Snowflake Secure Data Sharing enables organizations to instantly and securely share their data. Secure Data Sharing enables account-to-account sharing of data through Snowflake database tables, secure views, and secure UDFs
With Secure Data Sharing, data doesn’t move, eliminating the cost, headache, and delays associated with legacy data sharing methods that deliver only slices of stale data, and limited insights associated with that data. Snowflake’s modern approach to data sharing provides any organization easy access to shared data, so they can combine it with their existing data to get the deepest insights possible
With Secure Data Sharing, no actual data is copied or transferred between accounts. All sharing is accomplished through Snowflake’s unique services layer and metadata store. This is an important concept because it means that shared data does not take up any storage in a consumer account and, therefore, does not contribute to the consumer’s monthly data storage charges. The only charges to consumers are for the compute resources (i.e. virtual warehouses) used to query the shared data
It consists of two steps:
Shares are named Snowflake objects that encapsulate all of the information required to share a database. Each share consists of:
The privileges that grant access to the database(s) and the schema containing the objects to share.
The privileges that grant access to the specific objects (tables, secure views, and secure UDFs).
The consumer accounts with which the database and its objects are shared.