Categories: Book ReviewSnowflake

Book Review – Snowflake Security

When I was working with Snowflake on a project, it seemed security (assigning roles to users, assigning permissions etc.) is not as straight forward as it is in SQL Server. That’s why I bought the book Snowflake Security – Securing Your Snowflake Data Cloud, written by Ben Herzberg and Yoav Cohen, and published by Apress. The book itself is quite short – it is quite a niche topic – as it is only 185 pages long. This makes it quite digestible. I enjoyed the book, but in my opinion the chapter on authorization & data access control was a bit too theoretical and not enough practical. Since authorization was the exact reason I bought the book for, I would have liked more detailed examples on how to set-up a role hierarchy in Snowflake.

Anyway, the book is still practical and talks about many aspects of security in Snowflake. It talks about infrastructure (for example the different editions of Snowflake and time-travel), encryption, authentication (how to set up integration with Azure AD for example, or how to use MFA), authorization (again, a bit too theoretical about different access control methods), auditing & monitoring (a great long chapter with many examples queries on how to use the different system views and functions), data sharing and a final chapter about how you can use Snowflake to analyze security data.

I would definitely recommend the book for anyone who is going to be the “Snowflake DBA” at their company. You’ll learn many things about the different security aspects of Snowflake, and the book contains good example queries and even some tips on how to create a dashboard in Snowsight.

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Koen Verbeeck

Koen Verbeeck is a Microsoft Business Intelligence consultant at AE, helping clients to get insight in their data. Koen has a comprehensive knowledge of the SQL Server BI stack, with a particular love for Integration Services. He's also a speaker at various conferences.

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Chuck says:

April 13, 2022 at 4:07 pm

I would recommend the Snowflake DBA training class too. The security model is really not unlike SQL Server with one exception - all objects are owned by roles, not users. It actually makes security simpler for the DBA. Roles serve two purposes: to aggregate permission, and aggregate users. The latter purpose is similar to what we do with AD groups.