Snowflake Profile

Authentication Methods

User / Password authentication

Snowflake can be configured using basic user/password authentication as shown below.

~/.dbt/profiles.yml
my-snowflake-db:
  target: dev
  outputs:
    dev:
      type: snowflake
      account: [account id]


      # User/password auth
      user: [username]
      password: [password]


      role: [user role]
      database: [database name]
      warehouse: [warehouse name]
      schema: [dbt schema]
      threads: [1 or more]
      client_session_keep_alive: False
      query_tag: [anything]

Key Pair Authentication

To use key pair authentication, omit a password and instead provide a private_key_path and, optionally, a private_key_passphrase in your target. Note: Versions of dbt before 0.16.0 required that private keys were encrypted and a private_key_passphrase was provided. This behavior was changed in dbt v0.16.0.

~/.dbt/profiles.yml
my-snowflake-db:
  target: dev
  outputs:
    dev:
      type: snowflake
      account: [account id]
      user: [username]
      role: [user role]


      # Keypair config
      private_key_path: [path/to/private.key]
      private_key_passphrase: [passphrase for the private key, if key is encrypted]


      database: [database name]
      warehouse: [warehouse name]
      schema: [dbt schema]
      threads: [1 or more]
      client_session_keep_alive: False
      query_tag: [anything]

SSO Authentication

To use SSO authentication for Snowflake, omit a password and instead supply an authenticator config to your target. authenticator can be one of 'externalbrowser' or a valid Okta URL.

▶Changelog

Note: By default, every connection that dbt opens will require you to re-authenticate in a browser. The Snowflake connector package supports caching your session token, but it currently only supports Windows and Mac OS. See the Snowflake docs for how to enable this feature in your account.

~/.dbt/profiles.yml
my-snowflake-db:
  target: dev
  outputs:
    dev:
      type: snowflake
      account: [account id]
      user: [username]
      role: [user role]


      # SSO config
      authenticator: externalbrowser


      database: [database name]
      warehouse: [warehouse name]
      schema: [dbt schema]
      threads: [between 1 and 8]
      client_session_keep_alive: False
      query_tag: [anything]

Configurations

The "base" configs for Snowflake targets are shown below. Note that you should also specify auth-related configs specific to the authentication method you are using as described above.

All configurations

ConfigRequired?Description
accountYesThe account to connect to as per Snowflake's documentation. See notes below
userYesThe user to log in as
databaseYesThe database that dbt should create models in
warehouseYesThe warehouse to use when building models
schemaYesThe schema to build models into by default. Can be overridden with custom schemas
roleNo (but recommended)The role to assume when running queries as the specified user.
client_session_keep_aliveNoIf provided, issue a periodic select statement to keep the connection open when particularly long-running queries are executing (> 4 hours). Default: False (see note below)
threadsNoThe number of concurrent models dbt should build. Set this to a higher number if using a bigger warehouse. Default=1
query_tagNoA value with which to tag all queries, for later searching in QUERY_HISTORY view

account

For AWS accounts in the default US West region, this will be something like abc123 (without any other segments). For AWS accounts not in the default US West region and for GCP and Azure-based accounts, you also have to append the cloud platform, such as aws, gcp or azure, respectively (for example: abc123.us-central1.gcp) See Snowflake's documentation for more information.

client_session_keep_alive

The client_session_keep_alive feature is intended to keep Snowflake sessions alive beyond the typical 4 hour timeout limit. The snowflake-connector-python implementation of this feature can prevent processes that use it (read: dbt) from exiting in specific scenarios. If you encounter this in your deployment of dbt, please let us know in the GitHub issue, and work around it by disabling the keepalive.

query_tag

▶Changelog

Query tags are a Snowflake parameter that can be quite useful later on when searching in the QUERY_HISTORY view.

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