Snowflake Connector: Overview

The OCF Connector for Snowflake was developed by Alation and is available on request. Create a ticket with Alation Support about receiving the Snowflake connector package.

This connector should be used to catalog Snowflake data sources in Alation. It extracts Snowflake objects such as tables, columns, views, primary keys, foreign keys, functions, and stored procedures. Users will be able to search and find Snowflake objects, curate Snowflake object pages, and understand the business transformation of their data from the Alation user interface.

Team

The following administrators are required to install this connector:

• Alation administrator:

  • Installs the connector

  • Creates and configures a Snowflake data source in the Catalog

• Snowflake administrator:

  • Creates a service account that should have read privileges to access underlying tables/views

  • Provides the JDBC URI to access metadata

  • Provides access to public schemas to extract metadata.

Scope

The table below shows what features are covered by the connector:

Version Support	Snowflake
Core Capabilities
Automated metadata extraction (MDE)	✔
Query-based MDE	✔
Search	✔
Catalog page curation	✔
Catalog sets	✔
Propagation of trust flags	✔
Popularity	✔
Compose
Compose authentication (Basic Authentication)	✔
Compose authentication (OAuth)	✔
Compose query creation	✔
Query execution	✔
QLI
Query based QLI	✔
Filters	✔
Lineage	✔
Predicates	✔
External table files lineage	✔
Sampling and Profiling
Table sampling	✔
Custom query-based table sampling	✔
Custom query-based column profiling	✔
Dynamic profiling	✔
Overrides	✔
Service Account Authentication
Basic (username and password)	✔
Key Pair	✔
Kerberos	ㄨ
Keytab	ㄨ
LDAP	ㄨ
OAuth for Dynamic Profiling	✔
OAuth for Compose	✔
Technical Metadata
Tables	✔
Attributes	✔
Primary keys	✔
Foreign keys	✔
Views	✔
Schemas	✔
External tables	✔
Materialized views	✔
Stored procedures	✔*
Functions	✔*
Function definitions	ㄨ
Tags	✔
Policies	✔
Source comments	✔
Secure views	✔
Secure materialized views	✔
Secure UDFs	✔

* Stored procedures and function will appear in the search results