Snowflake Profile
Overview of dbt-snowflake
Maintained by: core dbt maintainers
Author: dbt Labs
Source: Github
Core version: v0.13.0 and newer
dbt Cloud: Supported
dbt Slack channel Link to channel
Authentication Methods
User / Password authentication
Snowflake can be configured using basic user/password authentication as shown below.
my-snowflake-db:target: devoutputs:dev:type: snowflakeaccount: [account id]# User/password authuser: [username]password: [password]role: [user role]database: [database name]warehouse: [warehouse name]schema: [dbt schema]threads: [1 or more]client_session_keep_alive: Falsequery_tag: [anything]
Key Pair Authentication
To use key pair authentication, omit a password
and instead provide a private_key_path
and, optionally, a private_key_passphrase
in your target. Note: Versions of dbt before 0.16.0 required that private keys were encrypted and a private_key_passphrase
was provided. This behavior was changed in dbt v0.16.0.
my-snowflake-db:target: devoutputs:dev:type: snowflakeaccount: [account id]user: [username]role: [user role]# Keypair configprivate_key_path: [path/to/private.key]private_key_passphrase: [passphrase for the private key, if key is encrypted]database: [database name]warehouse: [warehouse name]schema: [dbt schema]threads: [1 or more]client_session_keep_alive: Falsequery_tag: [anything]
SSO Authentication
To use SSO authentication for Snowflake, omit a password
and instead supply an authenticator
config to your target. authenticator
can be one of 'externalbrowser' or a valid Okta URL.
Note: By default, every connection that dbt opens will require you to re-authenticate in a browser. The Snowflake connector package supports caching your session token, but it currently only supports Windows and Mac OS. See the Snowflake docs for how to enable this feature in your account.
my-snowflake-db:target: devoutputs:dev:type: snowflakeaccount: [account id]user: [username]role: [user role]# SSO configauthenticator: externalbrowserdatabase: [database name]warehouse: [warehouse name]schema: [dbt schema]threads: [between 1 and 8]client_session_keep_alive: Falsequery_tag: [anything]
Configurations
The "base" configs for Snowflake targets are shown below. Note that you should also specify auth-related configs specific to the authentication method you are using as described above.
All configurations
Config | Required? | Description |
---|---|---|
account | Yes | The account to connect to as per Snowflake's documentation. See notes below |
user | Yes | The user to log in as |
database | Yes | The database that dbt should create models in |
warehouse | Yes | The warehouse to use when building models |
schema | Yes | The schema to build models into by default. Can be overridden with custom schemas |
role | No (but recommended) | The role to assume when running queries as the specified user. |
client_session_keep_alive | No | If provided, issue a periodic select statement to keep the connection open when particularly long-running queries are executing (> 4 hours). Default: False (see note below) |
threads | No | The number of concurrent models dbt should build. Set this to a higher number if using a bigger warehouse. Default=1 |
query_tag | No | A value with which to tag all queries, for later searching in QUERY_HISTORY view |
account
For AWS accounts in the default US West region, this will be something like abc123
(without any other segments). For AWS accounts not in the default US West region and for GCP and Azure-based accounts, you also have to append the cloud platform, such as aws
, gcp
or azure
, respectively (for example: abc123.us-central1.gcp
) See Snowflake's documentation for more information.
client_session_keep_alive
The client_session_keep_alive
feature is intended to keep Snowflake sessions alive beyond the typical 4 hour timeout limit. The snowflake-connector-python implementation of this feature can prevent processes that use it (read: dbt) from exiting in specific scenarios. If you encounter this in your deployment of dbt, please let us know in the GitHub issue, and work around it by disabling the keepalive.
query_tag
Query tags are a Snowflake parameter that can be quite useful later on when searching in the QUERY_HISTORY view.