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Snowflake

Snowflake is a cloud data platform known for its scalability, ease of use, and separation of storage and compute. Rill supports connecting to Snowflake as a live connector, allowing you to build metrics views and dashboards directly on top of existing Snowflake tables — no data movement required.

Snowflake as a Live Connector vs. Data Source Connector

Rill supports Snowflake in two distinct modes:

  • OLAP (Live Connector) — Rill queries Snowflake directly at dashboard load time. No data is ingested into Rill. Use this when your data is already modeled and optimized in Snowflake and you want Rill as a visual layer on top. Set olap_connector: snowflake in rill.yaml.

  • Data Source Connector — Rill extracts data from Snowflake and ingests it into its embedded engine (DuckDB or ClickHouse). Use this when you want Rill to manage the data pipeline, apply transformations via SQL models, or combine Snowflake data with other sources. See the Snowflake data source docs.

In general, use the live connector if your Snowflake tables are already production-ready and large. Use data source ingestion if you need to transform, join, or enrich the data before building dashboards.

Connect to Snowflake​

After selecting "Add Data", select Snowflake and fill in your connection parameters. This will automatically create the snowflake.yaml file in your connectors directory and populate the .env file with your credentials.

For more information on supported parameters, see our Snowflake connector YAML reference docs.

type: connector
driver: snowflake

dsn: "{{ .env.SNOWFLAKE_DSN }}"
Finding your account identifier

Your account identifier appears in your Snowflake URL — it's everything before .snowflakecomputing.com. For example, if your URL is https://xy12345.us-east-1.snowflakecomputing.com, your account identifier is xy12345.us-east-1.

For production use, Snowflake recommends key-pair authentication over passwords. Generate an unencrypted PKCS#8 private key and base64-encode it:

# Generate a 2048-bit unencrypted PKCS#8 private key
openssl genrsa 2048 | openssl pkcs8 -topk8 -nocrypt -out rsa_key.p8

# Base64 URL-encode for use in Rill
base64 -w 0 rsa_key.p8

Then set the encoded key in your connector:

type: connector
driver: snowflake

account: "<ACCOUNT_IDENTIFIER>"
user: "<USERNAME>"
private_key: "{{ .env.SNOWFLAKE_PRIVATE_KEY }}"

See Snowflake's key-pair authentication docs for full setup instructions.

Build a Metrics View on Snowflake​

Once connected, set Snowflake as the OLAP connector in your rill.yaml:

olap_connector: snowflake

Then create a metrics view that references a Snowflake table:

type: metrics_view

connector: snowflake
database: MY_DATABASE
database_schema: MY_SCHEMA
model: MY_TABLE

timeseries: created_at
dimensions:
  - column: region
  - column: category
measures:
  - name: total_revenue
    expression: SUM(revenue)
note

Rill supports metrics views directly on Snowflake as a live connector. Incremental models and partitioned ingestion are not supported in live connector mode.