Snowflake
Secure Data Sharing & Reader Accounts
Share live data across Snowflake accounts without copying or moving it.
Snowflake's Secure Data Sharing lets one account (the provider) grant another account (the consumer) live, read-only access to specific databases, schemas, tables, or views — without ETL, file transfers, or data duplication. The consumer queries the shared data directly against the provider's storage, always seeing the latest version.
It's like giving someone a live, read-only window into your filing cabinet instead of mailing them photocopies — they always see the current contents, and you never lose control of the original.
Key Concepts
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Sharing is implemented through a Share object, which packages grants on specific database objects. The provider creates the share and grants usage to a consumer account by account identifier; the consumer then creates a database from that share, which behaves like a read-only, always-fresh database.
Share
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For organizations that want to share data with a consumer who doesn't already have a Snowflake account, Snowflake offers reader accounts — lightweight, provider-managed Snowflake accounts created specifically to consume shared data. The provider bears the compute cost for reader account queries, making this useful for external partners or customers to whom the provider is delivering data as a service.
reader accounts
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This mechanism underlies the Snowflake Marketplace, where organizations publish datasets for other Snowflake customers to consume directly, and is a major differentiator versus traditional data warehouses that require exporting/importing files or building data pipelines to share data externally.
Snowflake Marketplace