Connect Snowflake

The following fields are required when creating a Snowflake connection

Field	Description	Examples
Account	The Snowflake account to connect to. Take a look here to determine what the account field should look like based on your region.	✅ db5261993 or db5261993.east-us-2.azure   ❌ db5261993.eu-central-1.snowflakecomputing.com
Role	A mandatory field indicating what role should be assumed after connecting to Snowflake	transformer
Database	The logical database to connect to and run queries against.	analytics
Warehouse	The virtual warehouse to use for running queries.	transforming

Note: A crucial part of working with dbt atop Snowflake is ensuring that users (in development environments) and/or service accounts (in deployment to production environments) have the correct permissions to take actions on Snowflake! Here is documentation of some example permissions to configure Snowflake access.

Username / Password

Available in: Development environments, Deployment environments

The Username / Password auth method is the simplest way to authenticate Development or Deployment credentials in a dbt project. Simply enter your Snowflake username (specifically, the login_name) and the corresponding user's Snowflake password to authenticate dbt Cloud to run queries against Snowflake on behalf of a Snowflake user.

Note: The schema field in the Developer Credentials section is a required field.

Snowflake username/password authentication

Key Pair

Available in: Development environments, Deployment environments

The Keypair auth method uses Snowflake's Key Pair Authentication to authenticate Development or Deployment credentials for a dbt Cloud project.

After generating an encrypted key pair, be sure to set the rsa_public_key for the Snowflake user to authenticate in dbt Cloud:

alter user jsmith set rsa_public_key='MIIBIjANBgkqh...';

Finally, set the "Private Key" and "Private Key Passphrase" fields in the "Edit Credentials" page to finish configuring dbt Cloud to authenticate with Snowflake using a key pair.

Note: At this time ONLY Encrypted Private Keys are supported by dbt Cloud, and the keys must be of size 4096 or smaller.

In order to successfully fill in the Private Key field, you must include the commented lines below when you add the passphrase. Leaving the PRIVATE KEY PASSPHRASE field empty will return an error - have a look at the examples below:

Example:

-----BEGIN ENCRYPTED PRIVATE KEY-----
< encrypted private key contents here >
-----END ENCRYPTED PRIVATE KEY-----

Snowflake keypair authentication

Snowflake OAuth

Available in: Development environments, Enterprise plans only

The OAuth auth method permits dbt Cloud to run development queries on behalf of a Snowflake user without the configuration of Snowflake password in dbt Cloud. For more information on configuring a Snowflake OAuth connection in dbt Cloud, please see the docs on setting up Snowflake OAuth.

Configuring Snowflake OAuth connection

Configuration

To learn how to optimize performance with data platform-specific configurations in dbt Cloud, refer to Snowflake-specific configuration.