Snowflake Data Sharing: Secure Data Sharing & Marketplace Complete Guide

Snowflake Secure Data Sharing lets you share data across accounts in real time without making a physical copy. The provider creates a Share object and adds tables, views, and UDFs to it, and the consumer just creates a database from that Share to start querying. This article walks through everything from creating a Share to Reader Account and Marketplace.

How Zero-Copy Sharing Works

Traditional data sharing required ETL or file transfers to create copies of the data. With Snowflake's zero-copy sharing, the consumer reads directly from the provider's micro-partitions.

Zero-copy sharing architecture:

[Provider Account]
  ├─ Table: sales_data
  │     └─ Micro-partitions (on S3 / Azure Blob / GCS)
  │
  ├─ Share: sales_share
  │     └─ Metadata references only (no data copy)
  │
  ▼
[Consumer Account]
  ├─ Database: shared_sales_db (FROM SHARE)
  │     └─ Reads provider's micro-partitions directly
  │
  └─ Warehouse: consumer_wh (runs on consumer side)

• Storage cost: provider only (because no copy exists)
• Compute cost: consumer pays via their own warehouse
• Data freshness: provider updates are reflected immediately

Creating and Managing a Share

Provider-side Setup

-- Step 1: Create the Share object
CREATE SHARE sales_share
  COMMENT = 'Monthly sales data share';

-- Step 2: Grant USAGE on the database
GRANT USAGE ON DATABASE analytics_db TO SHARE sales_share;

-- Step 3: Grant USAGE on the schema
GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA analytics_db.public TO SHARE sales_share;

-- Step 4: Grant SELECT on the table
GRANT SELECT ON TABLE analytics_db.public.monthly_sales
  TO SHARE sales_share;

-- Sharing a Secure View
GRANT SELECT ON VIEW analytics_db.public.sales_summary_v
  TO SHARE sales_share;

-- Step 5: Add the consumer account to the Share
ALTER SHARE sales_share ADD ACCOUNTS = consumer_org.consumer_acct;

-- Adding multiple accounts
ALTER SHARE sales_share ADD ACCOUNTS = org1.acct1, org2.acct2;

Consumer-side Setup

-- List available Shares
SHOW SHARES;

-- Create a shared database from the Share
CREATE DATABASE shared_sales
  FROM SHARE provider_org.provider_acct.sales_share;

-- Query the shared data
SELECT * FROM shared_sales.public.monthly_sales
WHERE sale_month >= '2026-01-01';

-- Grant access to users in your own organization
GRANT IMPORTED PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE shared_sales TO ROLE analyst_role;

Shareable Objects

Non-SECURE views cannot be included in a Share. This prevents the view definition (SQL text) from being exposed to the consumer.

Reader Account

A Reader Account is the mechanism for sharing data with external partners or customers who do not have a Snowflake account of their own. It is created and managed from the provider account, and the provider also pays for the warehouse compute.

-- Create a Reader Account
CREATE MANAGED ACCOUNT partner_reader
  ADMIN_NAME = 'reader_admin',
  ADMIN_PASSWORD = 'StrongP@ss123!',
  TYPE = READER;

-- Assign the Share to the Reader Account
ALTER SHARE sales_share ADD ACCOUNTS = partner_reader;

-- Set up a Resource Monitor to control cost
CREATE RESOURCE MONITOR reader_monitor
  WITH CREDIT_QUOTA = 10
  TRIGGERS
    ON 80 PERCENT DO NOTIFY
    ON 100 PERCENT DO SUSPEND;

Reader Account vs Full Account Sharing

Snowflake Marketplace

Snowflake Marketplace is a platform built on top of Data Sharing for publishing, discovering, and acquiring data products.

• Providers publish datasets as Listings
• Both free Listings and paid Listings (Monetization) are supported
• Consumers can find and acquire Listings from the Marketplace and query them immediately
• A Personalized Listing is a limited Listing visible only to specific accounts

Listing Types

Why Secure Views Matter

Data Sharing does not allow regular views to be shared; Secure Views are required. A Secure View hides the view definition (SQL text) from the consumer and also restricts certain query optimizer optimizations to prevent data leakage.

-- Create a Secure View
CREATE OR REPLACE SECURE VIEW sales_summary_v AS
SELECT
  region,
  product_category,
  DATE_TRUNC('MONTH', sale_date) AS sale_month,
  SUM(amount) AS total_amount,
  COUNT(*) AS transaction_count
FROM sales_data
WHERE is_active = TRUE
GROUP BY 1, 2, 3;

-- Add the Secure View to the Share
GRANT SELECT ON VIEW sales_summary_v TO SHARE sales_share;

Exam Prep Highlights

• Data Sharing is zero-copy (no physical copy of the data is created)
• Storage cost is paid by the provider; compute cost is paid by the consumer (except for Reader Accounts)
• Regular views cannot be shared; Secure Views are required
• Compute cost for a Reader Account is paid by the provider
• Consumer permissions on a shared DB are managed via IMPORTED PRIVILEGES
• Cross-region sharing requires database replication
• A Share needs a chain of USAGE grants (DB -> schema -> table)

Sample Question

Frequently Asked Questions