Snowflake Horizon

Snowflake Horizon is Snowflake’s built-in Iceberg REST catalog. Registering it makes your Snowflake-managed Iceberg tables queryable from the lake. Credentials for the table files are vended by Snowflake, so you don’t configure any storage access.

To query regular Snowflake tables, use a Snowflake connection instead.

Setup

1. Create a key pair

Authenticate as a Snowflake user with an encrypted RSA key pair:

openssl genrsa 2048 | openssl pkcs8 -topk8 -v2 aes-256-cbc -inform PEM -out rsa_key.p8
openssl rsa -in rsa_key.p8 -pubout -out rsa_key.pub

ALTER USER my_user SET RSA_PUBLIC_KEY='<contents of rsa_key.pub>';

2. Register the catalog

Open Settings → Lake and find External catalogs.
Select Snowflake Horizon and fill in the fields:

Field	Description
Catalog name	A short name, e.g. `sf_horizon`. Tables are queried as `name.schema.table`.
Catalog URI	`https://<account>.snowflakecomputing.com/polaris/api/catalog`
Catalog database	The Snowflake database to expose
Role	The Snowflake role used to read the catalog
Cloud provider	Where your Snowflake account runs
Region	Your Snowflake account’s region, e.g. `us-west-2`
Username	The Snowflake user from step 1
Private key (PEM)	The contents of `rsa_key.p8`
Private key passphrase	The key’s passphrase

Or from the CLI, piping the passphrase on stdin:

printenv SNOWFLAKE_KEY_PASSPHRASE | oleander catalogs register sf_horizon \
  --type horizon \
  --catalog-uri https://<account>.snowflakecomputing.com/polaris/api/catalog \
  --database ANALYTICS \
  --role OLEANDER_ROLE \
  --region us-west-2 \
  --username OLEANDER \
  --private-key-file ./rsa_key.p8

The CLI also accepts a programmatic access token with --auth-type pat, piped on stdin.

Query

Test the catalog from the CLI:

oleander query '
  SELECT
    species,
    COUNT(*) AS n
  FROM sf_horizon.default.flowers
  GROUP BY species
  ORDER BY n DESC
' --engine duckdb

Drop --engine duckdb to let oleander pick the engine automatically.

Getting Started

Platform

IAM

Connections

Integrations

Coding with agents

CLI

External Compute

Snowflake Horizon

Setup

1. Create a key pair

2. Register the catalog

Query

​Setup

​1. Create a key pair

​2. Register the catalog

​Query

Setup

1. Create a key pair

2. Register the catalog

Query