If your organisation works with data in its own Snowflake account, you may be interested in accessing ForwardKeys smart data that you have available in your ForwardKeys Connect platform directly from this account. This can be managed by creating Snowflake Direct share from Connect to your account.
Benefits of accessing data from your own Snowflake account include:
- Getting all the data that your organisation works with in one place
- Once the data share is activated, you will always have access to the most up-to-date information with no extra action on your side
- Increased privacy - ForwardKeys will have no visibility of how you work with our data when it is accessed in your environment (as opposed to launching queries to the Snowflake reader account provided by ForwardKeys Connect, in which case we can access the history of your queries)
How to configure this data consumption method?
There are two scenarios to be considered:
- Your Snowflake account is located in the same AWS region as the one used by ForwardKeys Connect - in this case everything can be done within the platform interface in a fully self-service mode. You will be able to choose "My Snowflake account" as your preferred data access method and configure all the necessary details in a few minutes. It comes with no additional cost and your Connect credit consumption will remain very low.
- Your Snowflake account is located in a different region, or uses a different cloud services provider. In this case, when you try to complete the setup from ForwardKeys Connect interface you will get a message asking you to contact us. This is because the setup in this case cannot be done automatically, and it comes with some extra cost related to both: the initial configuration and future maintenance. Once you agree on the details with your ForwardKeys contact person, we will enable the requested region for your organisation account and you will be able to follow the same self-service path as in the case 1.
Self-service setup - steps to follow
- Go to Connector settings page and click on ADD CONNECTOR or go to My workspace, click on any row or on the Connect button to open the page with the details of any of your data views, then click on ADD CONNECTION button and from Create new connector section, select My Snowflake account.
- Fill the form with all the requested information. You can get the necessary values from your Snowflake account details, in the form we provide a hint telling you how to find them.
- Once you save and confirm the connector setup, within just a few minutes, all the data from your ForwardKeys Connect account will be made available to your Snowflake account as a Direct share.
- Now it is all on your side. Find the newly created Direct share in your Snowflake account and get it into any database schema within your account that you wish to work with. Connect interface will let you know how the Direct share is called, to make it easier for you to identify it.
How does the Snowflake Direct share work?
When a new connection is established for any data view in ForwardKeys Connect, or when you create the connector from Connector settings section, the creation of the data share starts. The Direct share that we will make available for your Snowflake account will contain all the data views you have in your ForwardKeys Connect platform. All the future updates, changes in the definition of your custom views, new views created, and of course the added or refreshed data, will be also available for your Direct share automatically, and if you move your share to a database in your account, it will be updated automatically too. The Direct share will be a mirror of your account in ForwardKeys Connect in every moment.
It is important to remember that after your contract with ForwardKeys expires, or when someone from your organisation deletes the "My Snowflake account" type connector, the Direct share will stop working, meaning that the database to which you connected it will no longer show any data.