Configure Compose

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

To configure the use of Compose with your Snowflake OCF data source, go to the Compose tab on the Settings page.

Configure Personal Access Token Authentication

Snowflake is deprecating the use of passwords for both user and service accounts. In response, Alation supports Personal Access Tokens (PATs) for individual connections in Compose and for scheduling queries.

Important

PATs have an expiration date. To avoid disruptions, make sure to update tokens in Alation before they expire, as scheduled queries rely on uninterrupted authentication.

To use PAT tokens in Compose:

Step 1: Generate PAT within Snowflake

Use the information in Generating a programmatic access token in Snowflake documentation to generate a PAT.

Important

When configuring PATs, you can set the maximum expiration period (in days). Once the token expires, it must be updated in Alation to maintain access.

To avoid disruptions, we recommended exploring options within Snowflake for notifying users in advance of token expiration. This article may provide helpful guidance.

Step 2: Update Compose Connection Settings

Once you have a PAT, you can either create a new connection setting in Alation or update an existing one.

When creating a new connection, use your username as Username and enter the PAT in the Password field.

If you’re switching from basic username-password authentication, it’s recommended to update the existing connection. This ensures that all scheduled queries relying on that connection continue to run without interruption. Use your existing username and enter the PAT in the Password field.

For information on how to create or update Compose connections, see Working with Data Source Connections.

Incremental Ingestion of Compose Queries

When you run DDL queries in Compose, Alation incrementally ingests the corresponding metadata into the catalog. There are some requirements for the JDBC URI and the use of object names that ensure that Alation can incrementally ingest queries from Compose:

  1. Both the service account connection JDBC URI and the Compose connection URI must include the database name parameter (db).

  2. To ensure that tables and views created in Compose are ingested into the catalog, use fully qualified table names, for example:

    • Creating a table:

      CREATE TABLE <DATABASE>.<SCHEMA>.<TABLE> ({column properties});

    • Creating a view:

      USE <DATABASE>;
CREATE VIEW <SCHEMA>.<VIEW> AS {view condition};