Jessica Megan Larson - Snowflake Access Control: Mastering the Features for Data Privacy and Regulatory Compliance

This Apress imprint is published by the registered company APress Media, LLC part of Springer Nature.

The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.

Traditionally, databases have provided few features and an environment focused mainly on efficiently storing data in a way that can be fetched with high performance. These databases were not designed for user-friendliness this was a time when if you wanted to work with the database, you had to know your way around the command line. Enter the new wave of SaaS databases with a breadth of features and user interfaces a non-technical user could interact with. Snowflake led the pack on this, and quickly became a database known for its performance, as well as a ton of baked-in features making access control easier. They had the largest software Initial Public Offering (IPO) in history.

At the same time, consumers started to become aware of the privacy implications around their personal data data that is held across a multitude of companies and exchanged fairly freely between them. As a result, we started to see an outpouring of new and attempted privacy laws across the world. Europe led the way with their General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a comprehensive set of regulations that dictate, among other things, what data companies can collect, how they can collect it, how they must store and protect it, and the role of the consumers consent in all of this.

This book was designed to cover everything a data engineer or administrator may need to know in order to implement any level of access control in their Snowflake database in order to comply with existing regulations and beyond. As such, the book begins with the fundamental concepts that will help guide the understanding in later chapters.

Chapters cover the basic concepts of access control, including the types of data that may require access control, the laws and regulations at play, and the different types of privileges Snowflake provides.

Chapters cover roles in Snowflake the different types of roles from a theoretical perspective, how a user works with their roles, secondary roles, and how to build roles using role inheritance.

Chapters are the meat of the book, these chapters are when everything comes into play. These chapters cover the actual act of implementing access control at the different levels in the Snowflake database hierarchy.

Chapters are geared more toward the operational side of things. These chapters will help guide process rather than implementation, and cover how we can create separate development and production environments, how we manage connections with upstream and downstream services, and how we manage incoming access requests at scale.

I want to thank my amazing editors, Jonathan Gennick, Jill Balzano, and Laura Berendson, whove fielded so many random questions throughout this process and have shown so much patience. I also want to thank my technical reviewer, Iliana Iankoulova, who has been outstanding in identifying ways I could improve this book delivered with kindness and candor.