How to crawl Snowflake

Once you have configured the Snowflake user permissions, you can establish a connection between Atlan and Snowflake. (If you are also using AWS PrivateLink or Azure Private Link for Snowflake, you will need to set that up first, too.)

To crawl metadata from Snowflake, complete the following steps.

Select the source

To select Snowflake as your source:

1. In the top right of any screen, navigate to New and then click New Workflow.
2. From the list of packages, select Snowflake Assets and click on Setup Workflow.

Provide credentials

To enter your Snowflake credentials:

1. For Account Identifiers (Host) enter the host, AWS PrivateLink endpoint, or Azure Private Link endpoint for your Snowflake instance.
2. For Authentication choose the method you configured when setting up the Snowflake user:
   
   • For Basic authentication, enter the Username and Password you configured in either Snowflake or the identity provider.
   • For Keypair authentication, enter the Username, Encrypted Private Key, and Private Key Password (if any) you configured.
3. For Role select the Snowflake role through which the crawler should run.
4. For Warehouse select the Snowflake warehouse in which the crawler should run.
5. Click Test Authentication to confirm connectivity to Snowflake using these details.
6. When successful, at the bottom of the screen click Next.

Configure the connection

To complete the Snowflake connection configuration:

1. Provide a Connection Name that represents your source environment. For example, you might use values like production, development, gold, or analytics.
2. (Optional) To change the users able to manage this connection, change the users or groups listed under Connection Admins.
   🚨 Careful! If you do not specify any user or group, nobody will be able to manage the connection — not even admins.
3. (Optional) To prevent users from querying any Snowflake data, change Allow SQL Query to No.
4. (Optional) To prevent users from previewing any Snowflake data, change Allow Data Preview to No.
5. At the bottom of the screen, click Next to proceed.

Configure the crawler

Before running the Snowflake crawler, you can further configure it.

You must select the extraction method you configured when you set up Snowflake for Atlan. For the Account Usage method, specify:

• the Database Name of the copied Snowflake database
• the Schema Name of the copied ACCOUNT_USAGE schema

You can override the defaults for any of the remaining options:

• To select the assets you want to exclude from crawling, click Exclude Metadata and filter for assets down to the schema level. (This will default to no assets, if none are specified.) 
• To select the assets you want to include in crawling, click Include Metadata and filter for assets down to the schema level. (This will default to all assets, if none are specified.)
• To have the crawler ignore tables and views based on a naming convention, specify a regular expression in the Exclude regex for tables & views field.
• To exclude lineage for views in Snowflake, change View Definition Language to No.
• To import tags from Snowflake to Atlan, change Import Tags to Yes.

• If you have received a custom crawler configuration from Atlan support, change Control Config to Custom and enter the value provided.

Run the crawler

To run the Snowflake crawler, after completing the steps above:

1. To check for any permissions or other configuration issues before running the crawler, click Preflight checks.
2. You can either:
   • To run the crawler once immediately, at the bottom of the screen, click the Run button.
   • To schedule the crawler to run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly, at the bottom of the screen, click the Schedule Run button.

Once the crawler has completed running, you will see the assets in Atlan's asset page! 🎉