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Snowflake loader

It is possible to run Snowflake Loader on both AWS and GCP.

Running on AWS​

There are two ways to set up the necessary Snowflake resources and run the loader on AWS:

  • using our dedicated open source Terraform modules to create the resources and deploy the loader on EC2
  • creating the resources and running the application manually.

We recommend the first way.

Running on GCP​

At the moment, terraform modules for deploying Snowflake Loader on GCP aren't implemented. Therefore necessary Snowflake resources needs to be created and application needs to be deployed manually.

Using the Terraform modules (for AWS)​

Requirements​

Usage​

The terraform-snowflake-target and terraform-aws-snowflake-loader-setup modules create the necessary Snowflake resources to run the loader. The outputs of these modules become inputs to the terraform-aws-snowflake-loader-ec2 module.

Stitching these modules together is described here.

We also have full pipeline deployment examples here, including a deployment example for a pipeline with Snowflake as destination. This lets you see how all the Terraform modules are used in a full pipeline deployment.

Manual setup and deployment​

Setting up Snowflake​

The following resources need to be created:

Creating Snowflake stage for transformed events​

The Snowflake stage is the most complicated one to create from the resources listed above.

To create a Snowflake stage, you need a Snowflake database, Snowflake schema, Snowflake storage integration, Snowflake file format, and the blob storage (S3 or GCS) path to the transformed events bucket.

You can follow this tutorial to create the storage integration.

Assuming you created the other required resources for it, you can create the Snowflake stage by following this document.

Downloading the artifact​

The asset is published as a jar file attached to the Github release notes for each version.

It's also available as a Docker image on Docker Hub under snowplow/rdb-loader-snowflake:5.4.1.

Configuring rdb-loader-snowflake​

The loader takes two configuration files:

  • a config.hocon file with application settings
  • an iglu_resolver.json file with the resolver configuration for your Iglu schema registry.
Minimal ConfigurationExtended Configuration
aws/snowflake.config.minimal.hoconaws/snowflake.config.reference.hocon
gcp/snowflake.config.minimal.hocongcp/snowflake.config.reference.hocon

For details about each setting, see the configuration reference.

See here for details on how to prepare the Iglu resolver file.

tip

All self-describing schemas for events processed by RDB Loader must be hosted on Iglu Server 0.6.0 or above. Iglu Central is a registry containing Snowplow-authored schemas. If you want to use them alongside your own, you will need to add it to your resolver file. Keep it mind that it could override your own private schemas if you give it higher priority. For details on this see here.

Running the Snowflake loader​

The two config files need to be passed in as base64-encoded strings:

$ docker run snowplow/rdb-loader-snowflake:5.4.1 \
--iglu-config $RESOLVER_BASE64 \
--config $CONFIG_BASE64
Telemetry notice

By default, Snowplow collects telemetry data for Snowflake Loader (since version 5.0.0). Telemetry allows us to understand how our applications are used and helps us build a better product for our users (including you!).

This data is anonymous and minimal, and since our code is open source, you can inspect what’s collected.

If you wish to help us further, you can optionally provide your email (or just a UUID) in the telemetry.userProvidedId configuration setting.

If you wish to disable telemetry, you can do so by setting telemetry.disable to true.

See our telemetry principles for more information.

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