Snowflake Connector for Google Looker Studio

This topic describes how to use the Snowflake Connector for Google Looker Studio.

The Snowflake Connector for Google Looker Studio provides an interface to Google Looker Studio, data visualization software used to transform your raw data into the metrics and dimensions needed to create reports and dashboards.

This connector is available to anyone with a Google account as a Partner Connector within Google Looker Studio.

For more information about Google Looker Studio, see the Google Looker Studio documentation.

Connecting Your Snowflake Account to Google Looker Studio

  1. Sign in to Google Looker Studio.

  2. Click +, then select Data Source.

  3. Under the Partner Connectors section, select the Snowflake connector (the connector with the Snowflake logo).

  4. If required, authorize Google Looker Studio to use this community connector.

  5. Enter the following Snowflake user credentials to connect to Snowflake:

    • Username

    • Password

  6. Click Submit.

  7. Provide the following parameters required to connect to your Snowflake account:

    • Account URL

    • Role

    • Warehouse

    • Database

    • Schema

    • SQL query

    Note

    The SQL query cannot end with a semi-colon.

  8. Click Connect.

    A page containing data source fields displays.

  9. Click Create Report or Explore to visualize your data.

If you encounter problems while connecting to your Snowflake account, perform the following to revoking access:

  1. Sign in to Google Looker Studio.

  2. Select Data Sources.

  3. Browse or search for the Snowflake connector, then click More options.

  4. Click Revoke access.

After revoking access you can follow the steps in this section again to connect to your Snowflake account.

Mapping Snowflake Data Types to Looker Studio Data Types

The connector maps your Snowflake database data types to a unified set of data types as follows:

Snowflake Data Type

Google Looker Studio Data Type

BOOLEAN

BOOLEAN

FIXED

NUMBER

REAL

NUMBER

BINARY

TEXT

TEXT

TEXT

GEOGRAPHY

TEXT *

DATE

YEAR_MONTH_DAY

TIMESTAMP_LTZ

YEAR_MONTH_DAY_SECOND

TIMESTAMP_NTZ

YEAR_MONTH_DAY_SECOND

TIMESTAMP_TZ

YEAR_MONTH_DAY_SECOND

TIME

TEXT

OBJECT

TEXT *

VARIANT

TEXT *

ARRAY

TEXT *
*

Google Looker Studio does not support complex spatial types, so they are represented as text. The text format allows you to freely process data in custom visualizations.

Note

If Google Looker Studio encounters a column in a table or query of an unsupported type, it does not create a field for that column.

See Data Types for more information about Snowflake data types.

Network Policy Access

Connections from Google Looker Studio to Snowflake come from ephemeral Google servers with no fixed IP addresses. If your network uses network policies, you may need to open up the policy for the Looker Studio user to either allow ALL IP addresses (0.0.0.0/0) or use this shell script to get a list of possible GCP IP addresses with subnets.

Identifying Connector Queries in Your Query History

The Snowflake Connector for Google Looker Studio uses user-provided SQL statements as an inner SELECT statement for each generated query to a database. Due to this, you may see some more optimized queries in your query history that differ from the queries you entered when configuring a data source.

In your query history, the queries from the connector will include this inner SELECT statement.

Supported SQL Queries

Only the SELECT, SHOW, and DESCRIBE SQL statements are supported. The connector only supports specifying a single SQL statement as the query. It does not support selecting tables and views from a list.

Limitations

  • The connector only supports authentication using a username and password due to a limitation in Google Looker Studio. OAuth and key-pair authorization are not supported.

  • The current login flow only supports a single login (username and password), which only works for different accounts if all accounts use the same username and password. The connector does not support using multiple logins to different or the same Snowflake account.

  • Google limits the returned data set to 1 million rows and 50 MB of data. You may see unexpected errors when trying to return more data.

  • Column headers (field names) must use ASCII characters only. Non-ASCII characters are not supported.

  • Reports containing REGEXP_PARTIAL_MATCH and REGEXP_EXACT_MATCH operators are not optimized by pushdown filters. because Snowflake and Google Looker Studio supports different regexp types.

  • Pushdown filters are not supported for the SHOW and DESCRIBE statements and for DATE, TIME and TIMESTAMP columns.

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