Create a Snowflake Data Source

Follow these steps to connect to Snowflake and create a Snowflake data source:

1. Configure User Access Rights

2. Create a Snowflake Data Source

Refer to Additional Information for additional performance tips and information about Snowflake feature support.

Configure User Access Rights

We recommend creating a dedicated user and user role specifically for integrating with GoodData.

Steps:

1. Create a user role and grant it the following access rights:

   GRANT USAGE ON WAREHOUSE {warehouse_name} TO ROLE {role_name};
   GRANT USAGE ON DATABASE {database_name} TO ROLE {role_name};
   GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA {database_name}.{schema_name} TO ROLE {role_name};
   GRANT SELECT ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA {database_name}.{schema_name} TO ROLE {role_name};
   GRANT SELECT ON FUTURE TABLES IN SCHEMA {database_name}.{schema_name} TO ROLE {role_name};
   GRANT SELECT ON ALL VIEWS IN SCHEMA {database_name}.{schema_name} TO ROLE {role_name};
   GRANT SELECT ON FUTURE VIEWS IN SCHEMA {database_name}.{schema_name} TO ROLE {role_name};

2. Create a user and assign them the user role:

   GRANT ROLE {role_name} TO USER {user_name};

3. Make the user role default for the user:

   ALTER USER {user_name} SET DEFAULT_ROLE={role_name};

Snowflake Authentication Options

Snowflake supports two types of authentication:

• Key Pair Authentication (Recommended): Requires a private key and optional encryption passphrase.
• Basic Authentication: Requires a user password.

When using Key Pair authentication, enter the private key exactly as generated, including the prefix (-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----), suffix (-----END PRIVATE KEY-----), and line breaks.

For instructions on generating private keys, see Snowflake’s documentation.

Create a Snowflake Data Source

Once you have configured your Snowflake user’s access rights, you can proceed to create a Snowflake data source that you can then connect to.

from gooddata_sdk import GoodDataSdk, CatalogWorkspace, BasicCredentials, CatalogDataSourceSnowflake, SnowflakeAttributes

host = "<GOODDATA_URI>"
token = "<API_TOKEN>"
sdk = GoodDataSdk.create(host, token)

sdk.catalog_data_source.create_or_update_data_source(
    CatalogDataSourceSnowflake(
        id=data_source_id,
        name=data_source_name,
        db_specific_attributes=SnowflakeAttributes(
            account=os.environ["SNOWFLAKE_ACCOUNT"],
            warehouse=os.environ["SNOWFLAKE_WAREHOUSE"],
            db_name=os.environ["SNOWFLAKE_DBNAME"]
        ),
        schema=os.environ["SNOWFLAKE_SCHEMA"],
        credentials=BasicCredentials(
            username=os.environ["SNOWFLAKE_USER"],
            privateKey=os.environ["SNOWFLAKE_PRIVATEKEY"],
            privateKeyPassphrase=os.environ["SNOWFLAKE_PRIVATEKEY_PASSPHRASE"], # This parameter is optional.
        ),
    )
)

from gooddata_sdk import GoodDataSdk, CatalogWorkspace, BasicCredentials, CatalogDataSourceSnowflake, SnowflakeAttributes

host = "<GOODDATA_URI>"
token = "<API_TOKEN>"
sdk = GoodDataSdk.create(host, token)

sdk.catalog_data_source.create_or_update_data_source(
    CatalogDataSourceSnowflake(
        id=data_source_id,
        name=data_source_name,
        db_specific_attributes=SnowflakeAttributes(
            account=os.environ["SNOWFLAKE_ACCOUNT"],
            warehouse=os.environ["SNOWFLAKE_WAREHOUSE"],
            db_name=os.environ["SNOWFLAKE_DBNAME"]
        ),
        schema=os.environ["SNOWFLAKE_SCHEMA"],
        credentials=BasicCredentials(
            username=os.environ["SNOWFLAKE_USER"],
            password=os.environ["SNOWFLAKE_PASSWORD"],
        ),
    )
)

Additional Information

Query Tagging

GoodData can attach query tags to SQL statements so you can trace database workload back to its origin in GoodData. Tags are added automatically to supported executions when query tagging is enabled.

Query tagging is supported for:

• Visualization queries
• Label elements queries (for example, loading attribute values in filters)

Query tagging is not applied to exports (PDF, XLSX, CSV), alerts, or scheduled exports.

What Gets Tagged

Tags include execution context such as:

• Organization ID
• Workspace ID
• User ID
• Execution type (visualization query vs label elements query)
• When available, identifiers of the triggering dashboard and visualization

This metadata is intended for observability and performance troubleshooting. It does not include raw data values.

Enable Query Tagging

Query tagging is controlled by the ENABLE_QUERY_TAGS setting. You can enable it at the workspace level or at the organization level. The setting value is a boolean (true or false).

Example

Enabling query tagging at the workspace level:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer ${API_KEY}" \
  -X POST \
  -H "Content-Type: application/vnd.gooddata.api+json" \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.gooddata.api+json" \
  -d '{
    "data": {
      "type": "workspaceSetting",
      "id": "enable_query_tags",
      "attributes": {
        "content": { "value": true },
        "type": "ENABLE_QUERY_TAGS"
      }
    }
  }' \
  "https://${HOSTNAME}/api/v1/entities/workspaces/${WORKSPACE_ID}/workspaceSettings"

Snowflake Notes

Snowflake supports native query tagging. GoodData sets a JSON tag using ALTER SESSION SET QUERY_TAG for the duration of the query and clears it afterwards. You can see the tag in Snowflake query history and monitoring tools that surface the QUERY_TAG field.

Data Source Details

• The JDBC URL must be in the following format:

  jdbc:snowflake://<db_account>.snowflakecomputing.com:<db_port>?warehouse=<db_warehouse>&db=<db_name>

• Key Pair authentication does not change the JDBC URL. Provide the username and private key in the credentials fields when creating or editing the data source.

• GoodData uses up-to-date drivers.

Performance Tips

If your database holds a large amount of data, consider the following practices:

• GoodData’s connection pool allows for up to 24 connections. Snowflake’s default setting permits only 8 connections. We recommend increasing your Snowflake’s connection pool size to 24.
• Denormalize the relational data model of your database. This helps avoid large JOIN operations. Because Snowflake is a columnar database, queries read only the required columns and each column is compressed separately.
• Spin up databases/instances based on user needs.
  • Users with similar needs populate data into caches that are likely reused.
  • Isolate data transformation operations running in your database from the analytics generated by GoodData.
• Set up proper auto-scaling based on users needs.
• Utilize materialized views
  • Changes to underlying tables are propagated to related materialized views, they are always consistent
  • Materialize results of JOINs / aggregations which are executed very often as a result of execution of dashboards / visualizations from GoodData
    • Map materialized views and their columns to datasets and LDM and utilize them in metrics / visualizations / dashboards

Query Timeout

The default timeout value for queries is 160 seconds. If a query takes longer than 160 seconds, it is stopped. The user then receives a status code 400 and the message Query timeout occurred.

Query timeout is closely related to the ACK timeout. For proper system configuration, the ACK timeout should be longer than the query timeout. The default ACK timeout value is 170 seconds.

Permitted parameters

• db
• loginTimeout
• networkTimeout
• ocspFailOpen
• passcode
• passcodeInPassword
• useProxy
• proxyHost
• proxyPort
• proxyUser
• proxyPassword
• proxyProtocol
• queryTimeout
• role
• stringsQuotedForColumnDef
• token
• warehouse