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Snowflake Data Sharing – How does it work?

10.02.2022

Snowflake Secure Data Sharing is a Snowflake feature that allows you to share chosen database items from one or more databases with other Snowflake accounts. If you want to know more about it, we suggest you to read our previous blog Snowflake Secure Data Sharing, Data Marketplace and Data Exchange. Here we will focus on how it works and what benefits it brings.

Snowflake Data Sharing Accounts

snowflake data sharing - data provider

Data Provider

A provider organization can easily set up a “share” that allows consumer organizations to access a database, schemas, tables, and views that the provider organization has securely assigned to the “consumer organization.”

snowflake data sharing - data consumer

Data Consumers

A consumer organization in Snowflake can easily add a provider data share to their Snowflake account and gain instant insights by linking external data in real-time to internal data already available in Snowflake.

Similarly, consumer organizations can create multiple shares for other organizations, resulting in the creation of a web of B2B secure data sharing capabilities in Snowflake in minutes.

In addition to traditional data sharing in Snowflake, consumers can discover and access a variety of third-party data sets, which are then available directly in your Snowflake account. This enables you to do more than just run queries.

snowflake data sharing - data reader

Data Reader

We have a reader account in addition to the provider and consumer accounts. A reader account allows data consumers to access and query data shared by the account’s provider, with no setup or usage fees and no requirement for the consumer to sign a licensing agreement with Snowflake.

The provider account creates, owns, and manages the reader account, and it is solely responsible for any credit charges incurred by users in the reader account. The provider account, like standard consumer accounts, uses shares to share databases with reader accounts; however, a reader account can only consume data from the provider account that created it.

Reader accounts allow providers to share data with consumers who are not already Snowflake customers without requiring the use of the Snowflake platform.

Snowflake Data Sharing

What benefits does Snowflake Data Sharing bring?

Bring Your Data Together and Unleash Its Full Potential

It is one thing to collect the right data; it is quite another to make it accessible and actionable. You can easily join campaign platform data with your other business and customer data in Snowflake to analyze behavioral patterns, power data visualization, enrich business insights, and give everyone in your organization access to the right data, right when they need it, to take action, thanks to Snowflake’s unique data-sharing architecture.

Eliminate Complex Data Pipelines and lower the costs

The risk, costs, and maintenance of traditional data sharing methods are reduced, and the need to copy and move data is eliminated. Instead of maintaining complex data pipelines, granting instant access to read-only data in a frictionless and secure manner is provided. With Snowflake, you can reliably scale your business and pay only for the compute resources you need, thanks to an unlimited number of attachable shares.

Secure Access and Simple Setup

Spend less time managing and more time utilizing your data. Snowflake’s integrated platform manages data warehousing, security, data sharing, and governance, providing you with a turnkey solution that requires little maintenance. Furthermore, Snowflake Secure Data Sharing’s built-in permissions, revocable access, and governance controls make it simple to manage data access across your enterprise.

You can read more about Secure Sharing Data on snowflake.com.