Snowflake
Overview
Snowflake is a cloud-based data platform designed to facilitate data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development, and data sharing. It separates compute and storage, enabling users to scale up or down instantly without downtime, providing a cost-effective solution for data management. With its unique architecture and support for multi-cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, Snowflake offers seamless data integration, secure data sharing across organizations, and real-time access to data insights, making it a common choice to power many busienss intelligence applications or use cases. Rill supports natively connecting to and reading from Snowflake as a source using the Go Snowflake Driver.
Local credentials
When using Rill Developer on your local machine (i.e. rill start), Rill will use the credentials passed via the Snowflake connection string in one of several ways:
- As defined in the source YAML configuration directly via the
dsnproperty - As defined in the optional Snowflake Connection String field from within the UI source creation workflow (this is equivalent to setting the
dsnproperty in the underlying source YAML file) - As defined from the CLI when running
rill start --var connector.snowflake.dsn=...
Outside of local development, it is generally not recommended to specify / save the credentials directly in the dsn of your source YAML file as this information can potentially be committed to Git!
Rill uses the following syntax when defining the Snowflake connection string:
<username>:<password>@<account_identifier>/<database>/<schema>?warehouse=<warehouse>&role=<role>
To determine your Snowflake account identifier, one easy way would be to check your Snowflake account URL and the account identifier to use in your connection string should be everything before .snowflakecomputing.com!
If this project has already been deployed to Rill Cloud and credentials have been set for this source, you can use rill env pull to pull these cloud credentials locally (into your local .env file). Please note that this may override any credentials that you have set locally for this source.
Cloud deployment
When deploying a project to Rill Cloud (i.e. rill deploy), Rill requires credentials to be passed via the Snowflake connection string as a source configuration dsn field or by passing / updating the credentials directly used by Rill Cloud by running:
rill env configure
Note that you must first cd into the Git repository that your project was deployed from before running rill env configure.
If you've configured credentials locally already (in your <RILL_HOME>/.home file), you can use rill env push to push these credentials to your Rill Cloud project. This will allow other users to retrieve / reuse the same credentials automatically by running rill env pull.
Appendix
Using keypair authentication
Rill supports using keypair authentication for enhanced authentication security to Snowflake as an alternative to basic authentication. Per the Snowflake Go Driver specifications, this will imply the following changes to the dsn being used (note the authenticator and privateKey key-value pairs):
<username>@<account_identifier>/<database>/<schema>?warehouse=<warehouse>&role=<role>&authenticator=SNOWFLAKE_JWT&privateKey=<privateKey_base64_url_encoded>
If using keypair authentication, you may want to consider rotating your public key to ensure compliance with security and governance best practices. If rotating your key, you will need to following the described steps below again.
Generate a private key
You will first want to generate a 2048-bit PKCS#8 encoded RSA private key:
openssl genpkey -algorithm RSA -pkeyopt rsa_keygen_bits:2048 -pkeyopt rsa_keygen_pubexp:65537 | openssl pkcs8 -topk8 -outform der -nocrypt > rsa_key.p8
This will create a private key called rsa_key.p8 in your current working directory.
Generate a public key
You will next want to extract a 2048-bit PKI encoded RSA public key from the private key:
openssl pkey -pubout -inform der -outform der -in rsa_key.p8 -out rsa_key.pub
This will create a public key called rsa_key.pub in your current working directory.
Store the private and public keys securely
It is recommended to copy the public and private key files to a local directory for storage (and record the path to these files). Please note that the private key is stored using the PKCS#8 (Public Key Crypotgraphy Standards) format.
To ensure best practices, please make sure to secure these key files when they is not being used and to protect these files from unauthorized access by using the appropriate file permission mechanisms provided by your operating system.
Generate a Base64 URL-safe encoded version of your public key
Before assigning your public key to your user in Snowflake, we will need to generate a Base64 URL-safe encoded version of the public key using the following command:
cat rsa_key.pub | base64 | tr -d '\n'
Depending on the OS version, the command to generate a Base64 URL-safe encoded version of your key may slightly differ. Please check your OS reference manual for the correct syntax.
Before copying this output (for the next step), please make sure the resulting string does not end with a %. To double check, you can try writing the results to a text file and manually checking: cat rsa_key.pub | base64 | tr -d '\n' > public_key.txt.
Assign the encoded public key to a Snowflake user
Taking the output from the previous step, you can follow the steps described in Snowflake's documentation here to assign the public key to an appropriate Snowflake user.
Verify the user's public key fingerprint
Follow Snowflake's documentation here to verify the public key fingerprint and ensure the public key has been configured properly for the user.
You can use the same commands provided by Snowflake with minimal changes. You will only need to update the name of the user and public key (if different from rsa_key.pub)
Generate a Base64 URL-safe encoded version of your private key
Following similar steps, we will first need to generate a Base64 URL-safe encoded version of your private key:
cat rsa_key.p8 | base64 | tr '+/' '-_' | tr -d '\n'
Depending on the OS version, the command to generate a Base64 URL-safe encoded version of your key may slightly differ. Please check your OS reference manual for the correct syntax.
Before copying this output (for the next step), please make sure the resulting string does not end with a %. To double check, you can try writing the results to a text file and manually checking: cat rsa_key.p8 | base64 | tr -d '\n' > private_key.txt.
Update Snowflake DSN with encoded private key in Rill
Taking the output of the previous step, you will want to update the DSN accordingly in your source definition:
<username>@<account_identifier>/<database>/<schema>?warehouse=<warehouse>&role=<role>&authenticator=SNOWFLAKE_JWT&privateKey=<privateKey_base64_url_encoded>
The Base64 URL-safe encoded private key should be added to your privateKey parameter.