Snowflake Setup Guide

Trial account creation and environment configuration

title: “Snowflake Setup Guide” subtitle: “Trial account creation and environment configuration” —

Create a Free Trial

  1. Go to signup.snowflake.com
  2. Fill in your details
  3. Cloud Provider: Select Azure
  4. Region: Select West Europe (closest to our ADLS2 storage)
  5. Edition: Enterprise (30-day trial includes all features)
  6. Complete email verification
ImportantImportant: Azure + West Europe

Choosing Azure West Europe minimizes data transfer costs and latency when reading from our ADLS2 storage account, which is also in West Europe.

Initial Setup

Step 1: Login

Navigate to your Snowflake account URL (from the confirmation email). Log in with the credentials you created during signup.

Step 2: Run Account Setup

  1. Open a SQL Worksheet in Snowsight

  2. Open snowflake/setup/00_account_setup.sql

  3. Set your attendee ID:

    SET attendee_id = '01_alice';  -- Replace with your assigned ID

  4. Run all statements

  5. Verify: database, warehouse, and schemas created

Step 3: Configure External Stage

  1. Open snowflake/setup/02_external_stage.sql

  2. The trainer will provide the SAS token during the session

  3. Replace <SAS_TOKEN> with the provided token

  4. Run all statements

  5. Verify the stage works:

    LIST @nyc_taxi_trips_stage;
-- Should show Parquet files

Environment Verification

-- Check warehouse is running
SELECT CURRENT_WAREHOUSE();

-- Check schemas exist
SHOW SCHEMAS IN DATABASE DE_MASTERCLASS;

-- Check external stage
LIST @nyc_taxi_trips_stage PATTERN = '.*parquet';

Troubleshooting

Issue Solution
Trial expired Create a new trial with different email
Stage access denied Verify SAS token is correct (no extra spaces); check <SAS_TOKEN> was replaced
Warehouse suspended Run ALTER WAREHOUSE DE_WORKSHOP_WH RESUME;
Cannot create database Check you’re using ACCOUNTADMIN role
LIST shows no files Verify region is West Europe; check stage URL in 02_external_stage.sql

Snowpark Setup (for Python Path)

If you want to run Snowpark Python locally, your .env file (set up in Prerequisites) provides all the credentials automatically via environment variables.

Install the Snowpark library:

uv pip install --system snowflake-snowpark-python>=1.14.0

Snowpark scripts in this workshop (e.g. ml/snowflake/02_snowpark_ml_tip_prediction.py) read credentials from os.environ, so just make sure .env is loaded before running them:

source .env
python ml/snowflake/02_snowpark_ml_tip_prediction.py

Alternatively, Snowpark notebooks are available directly in Snowsight (no local installation required).