The moment you have saved your customised view in Connect, it automatically is available in the Snowflake account that we created for you. This means that connecting to your data from Power BI, Tableau, and almost any Business Intelligence tool you may want to use, is now very easy! With direct queries to our database you will be able to get the data from our platform into your tool in a few easy steps, and then refresh the data whenever you need with zero effort.
Accessing Connect views from a Business Intelligence tool
- Enter your preferred BI tool. The process can vary from one tool to another (see the links provided by Snowflake on their official website to check the details), but, in general, you will only need to go to the tool of your choice and add Snowflake as a new source of data.
- To establish the connection, your tool will ask you to provide some details, such as the server URL, the account identifier (some tools call it to account name or locator), the warehouse name and your Snowflake account credentials. You can get all the needed information from Connect platform's top bar, under the user menu > Connector settings > Snowflake > View
- Once the connection is established, your tool will ask you to choose the view you wish to connect to from the list. Under Custom Space > Public schema you'll find the complete list of the views available in your organisation's account.
- Your BI tool is now able to retrieve the data directly from the warehouse. In most cases, the tool will now ask you to decide whether you prefer to query the warehouse directly or import the data first (we recommend the import option for most cases).
Find more info about connecting specific BI tools to Snowflake on this page:
https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/ecosystem-bi.html
Working with Connect data in your own environment
If you don't use any of the common BI tools, but you do have your own tool where you analyze the data, you may need to use one of the available connectors or drivers available for Snowflake. Find more information on this page.
Retrieving your Custom data in Excel
If you are an avid Excel user, you can get the data directly from your Connect account and refresh it on demand with just one click using Get data > Other sources > ODBC driver. For this, once you have the ODBC driver correctly installed (find more information here), you will need to establish the connection with our data warehouse in a way very similar to other BI tools, using the information we provide for you under the user menu > Connector settings > Snowflake > View on your Forwardkeys Connect platform.
* Uploading data to your own cloud
A different option for accessing your data externally is uploading the data from your views to your own environment on the cloud. It is currently available via AWS S3 and Azure Storage account. This solution does not involve direct queries to our database, but consists on transferring data regularly. You can learn more about this method from this article.