To support our ongoing effort to transform and improve the user experience, Snowflake has released two new features for Data Sharing: A new UI and Reader Accounts.

With the new UI, users can easily point and click their way through the share wizard to provide instant and secure data access to their data consumers. This is a big step forward because it eliminates the need to use any SQL code.

Maximum flexibility

Designed to provide flexibility to the data provider, new Reader Accounts are sub-accounts of the main Provider account. As the Provider, you can now administer each of the Reader Accounts by managing roles, permissions, warehouses, monthly credit limits and access to data. Any credits incurred by Reader accounts are billed directly to the Provider, so it’s important to plan your rollout strategy.

The ability to create and manage shares is now a grantable permission. This allows someone other than Account_Admin role to supervise Data Sharing while making it easier for a Provider to provide Consumers with a self-service model to manage their own Reader accounts.

The new Reader accounts also allow write access against only the shared data. This allows BI tools access to write temp tables, when needed, while avoiding errors. The impetus for this change also came through customer feedback. They wanted the ability to write a CTAS statement to create a filtered or aggregated table from the existing share.

Setting up shares

To begin using shares, login in as the Account_Admin role then find and select the Shares button, which is located in the top left. This action brings you to the Shares tab which lists all the inbound and outbound shares associated with the account. To create a new share, click on the Create Share button. To create a database from an existing inbound share, click the Create Database From Share button.

Now you’re in the new Create Share Wizard screen. Here you can name and select which data objects (tables or secure views only) to share.

A helpful new feature of this release includes a Review page where you can validate your shared data. Using the Preview Data option, on this screen a provider can test for data accuracy and confirm that data security is properly implemented on a secure view.

Once you create the Data Share, the next step is to Add Consumers to the share. To choose which type of account(s) you’d like to share with, select the appropriate radio button, then click add.

If you’re an account admin, you’ll notice a change to the Users page. When you click on Users, you’ll now see a new tab for Readers which lists all accounts created in the Provider account. Here you can manage existing accounts and create new Reader accounts.

Expanding the value of data

The Snowflake team is excited to release this new update to Data Sharing. Many of our Data Sharing Providers are already leveraging this new Reader model to monetize their valuable data.

We encourage you to test out all the new functionality through the new UI experience. For those customers who rarely use the UI, take comfort in knowing that all this new functionality is available as SQL commands to script and automate your application. If you’d like to see a quick demo of the new features in action, check out this short video.