Snowflake connection with Power BI

Today I was asked by my friend about the Snowflake connection with Power BI! Though I have heard about Snowflake but never worked or got chance to work on it. I told my friend that I will check and will come back to you in couple of days.

The first thing I did after coming home is to explore about it and then created a free account of snowflake at https://trial.snowflake.com/. After this I created a new database “SAMPLEDB” as shown below, even though Snowflake provides sample databases but it's good to create new one.

Then you have to create a table and load data in it. Provide Table name, select Schema from the dropdown(can create new schema). Click on "Add" icon and create as many columns you wish to add in the table. I have created 9 columns in the table "Orders". Show SQL will show you the auto generated create table query based on columns added.

Now you have to load data in the table using the interactive options, different option available if you encounter any errors.

After the data is loaded, you can query the data using the SQL query. Here, I am using Select * from Orders

Now the data is loaded in the “Snowflake” data warehouse and is ready to be connected to your applications. Here, I will use Microsoft Power BI to connect to Snowflake table and bring the data to do detailed analysis. Like this, you can bring any amount of data for your analysis. You have to setup the Snowflake ODBC connection to connect with your applications, here I have already created an ODBC connection as “snowflaketest”. You have to input Server, user, warehouse, schema details in the connection properties.

Next, connect to your Power BI Desktop Instance and load data from Snowflake and provide the User name and Password.

The next screen gives you all the databases available in your snowflake DW.

Now the data is loaded and you are ready to create your visual reports.

Whatever time I spent today to understand Snowfake, I can say that it is one of the good option to your data warehouse which is a cloud based SaaS offering and is available on AWS or Azure platform. Another thing which I liked about it is that, you don't have to install or configure anything i.e no hardware involved. I will write another article on Snowflake separately covering all the important things.

I hope this article would be useful for many people who want to create Snowflake connection with their technologies to analyze data. Happy Learning!