Snowflake reader account FAQ

The reader account is recommended if you don’t have a Snowflake account, as it gives you a direct view to the live data of your Coveo organization which is stored in the Snowflake database. It lets you query different data tables, configure other business intelligence (BI) solutions, and precludes you from having to export data to a CSV file.

You can also do all of this with Data Share, along with some additional capabilities, such as:

You can use the Data Share feature if you have your own Snowflake account.

While it’s possible to use the reader account to create your own reports, the Coveo Usage Analytics out-of-the-box (OOTB) reports provide most of the information required for reporting purposes.

The reader account is provided primarily for:

Coveo uses the Snowflake Business Critical Edition and Tri-Secret encryption of data (see Snowflake Editions).

Coveo provides one X-small warehouse via the reader account.

Coveo assigns ten Snowflake credits per month to every client within their Coveo production organization, and assigns five credits per month to each client using a sandbox organization.

If you have a Coveo Enterprise license, you can be granted additional Snowflake credits by contacting Coveo Sales.

Yes, you can purchase additional credits, though you may need to modify your license. We recommend that you reach out to your Coveo Sales representative.

Your Snowflake queries will no longer run and will return an error until the credits are replenished in the following month.

Coveo provides a one X-small warehouse via the reader account, with the warehouse set to shut down automatically after one minute of inactivity. The computing costs for credits are determined by Snowflake, not Coveo. Therefore, we recommend that you consult Understanding Compute Cost for more details.

The calculation is as follows:

1 Snowflake credit = 1 hour of data processing time.

Therefore, the default of ten Snowflake credits assigned per month equates to ten hours of data processing time.

No, the assigned Snowflake credits are for the current month. At the start of each month, the limit is reset to your monthly credit limit.

No, because when the limit is reached, any subsequent Snowflake queries will fail until the limit is reset in the following month.

No, the Snowflake credits and the reader account are provided as part of your Coveo license and no additional Snowflake license is required. If you want to use Data Share, then a Snowflake License is required.

We offer different data export options so that you can access and leverage data based on your specific usage requirements.

Yes, the following article describes how Python can be used to automate the integration with your reader account: Use case: Retrieve Coveo UA data with the Python connector.

Snowflake supports SQL queries, and you can run them directly via the Snowflake web interface:

For more information on building SQL queries to retrieve your data, see Build SQL queries in Snowflake.

No, Coveo doesn’t provide an organization for this work effort. You can, however, use your sandbox organization to understanding the time and credits required in different contexts.

We recommend that you monitor the time needed to complete a Snowflake query, and then that you optimize your usage to maximize the Snowflake credits of your production organization, which will contain your Coveo Usage Analytics data.

Yes, here’s an example:

A large client with over three years of Coveo Usage Analytics data exports 115M rows of search impressions (the largest table) in less than 20 minutes, using streaming logic to their Data Lake. This is equivalent to approximately 0.33 credits. They also do daily delta exports of Coveo Usage Analytics that take less than five minutes to complete.

Yes, in fact, a few Coveo clients have started using this integration as well.

The primary keys for each table are the following:

No, because the COVEO Snowflake database is created from a share. Furthermore:

Depending on the integration option (for example, Fivetran), a client can create, view, and reference the COVEO database content within the CUSTOMER database. However, any work is owned by the client.

The data is clustered by date, so the fastest way to stream it into another system is to get a slice of the data based on the datetime column without trying to sort it.

Coveo stores Coveo Usage Analytics in Snowflake using micro-partition based on dates.

Coveo uses the Snowflake Business Critical Edition and tri-secret encryption of data.

By default, Coveo doesn’t process any data that falls into the special categories defined as sensitive by the GDPR. However, Coveo is a data-neutral and data-agnostic platform, and clients are in full control of the data that they choose to submit to Coveo.

The client solution controls which UA events are passed to Coveo and then stored within Snowflake and accessible from a reader account, from Coveo reports, and from the Visit Browser.

For more information on compliance, we recommend the following: Data privacy features and Compliance.

This is part of Snowflake’s network policies and it serves to provide an additional layer of security and control. For more information, see Network Policies.

Yes, they do. By allowing DHCP-assigned IPs, Snowflake enables flexibility in network configurations (see Network Policies).

Coveo and the Snowflake services it uses are hosted in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) North Virginia, Oregon, Ireland, and Australia regions, active-active on multiple AWS availability zones, each one distributed on multiple data centers. Each data center is engineered to be isolated from failure in other data centers for the highest fault tolerance and stability.

Coveo maintains a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) that defines the requirements for information security, and the recovery of the Coveo Hosted Services in case of a major outage of a whole primary region in AWS. This plan is tested at minimum once a year.

Snowflake’s main account falls under the same recovery plan as the rest of Coveo’s platform.