Connecting Snowflake with Lightcast Data Shares

Lightcast offers the world’s most comprehensive data on labor market trends, job postings, workforce profiles, compensation, career pathways, skills projections, demographic insights, and more. The launch of Lightcast data shares now makes it easier than ever to instantly slice, dice, and analyze large datasets.

What are Lightcast Data Shares?

Through data shares, Lightcast data is now available via direct data shares on Snowflake and other top data marketplaces, cloud storage platforms, and data warehouses.

Delivery through data shares is effortless, secure, and flexible, as data is shared directly with existing file storage or data warehouse platforms without the need for heavy technical lifting. 

For clients who need to slice, modify, or prepare data before integrating it into their solutions, either internally or externally, data sharing is a seamless way to deliver data. The data is always current and secure, as it’s shared directly with clients’ existing cloud storage or warehouse as platform-native sharing, a data feed, or both. 

Limited technical resources are needed for the integration, which reduces costs and speeds up processes. Data shares also make it easier for customers to use Lightcast data for ingestion into large language models, AI tools, and predictive analytic models. Additionally, Lightcast data shares can be tailored for each customer, and data share integration can be operational in less than 48 hours.

How Data Shares and Snowflake Work Together

Snowflake is one of many delivery destinations that Lightcast Data Shares support. Utilizing Snowflake Secure Data Sharing, Lightcast creates a Snowflake data share in which the configured Snowflake account(s) are granted access to create a read-only database from the share to query within their account.

What If I Don’t Use Snowflake?

Lightcast supports several data share destinations beyond Snowflake: Amazon S3, Databricks, Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, and SFTP. We also can provide a Snowflake Reader Account, which is a type of Snowflake account that we can provide our data share customers. Lightcast manages the Reader Account and provides you users on that Reader Account. A Reader Account is mainly for querying shared data, so it does not allow for you to upload data to it. However, you can use a Reader Account to unload data into your Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Microsoft Azure Blog Storage. This can be helpful if you have different projects requiring different data, as you can tailor each data unload for each project’s needs.

How to Connect Snowflake with Lightcast Data Shares

Lightcast requires the “Snowflake organization name” and “Snowflake account name” to grant account access to the Snowflake share. An Account Admin (or another user with import share privilege) on the Snowflake account that will consume the data must accept the data share to make it available within the account.

Before configuring a destination, a share must be created. Provide the following information for your Snowflake account. 

• Organization name

• Account name

• Platform

• Region

To accept the share from Lightcast, please do the following:

1. Sign in to Snowsight

2. Select Data Products » Private Sharing

3. On the Shared With You page under Privately Shared Listings, select Get on the listing provided by Lightcast

4. Give the database a name (optional)

5. Assign a permission role to the database (optional)

Note: Naming and permissions settings are both custom and can be based on your company’s internal conventions and permission standards

After completing the connection, users can select “Query Data” to open a worksheet and begin running queries, initiate a data download, or connect to other tools like PowerBI, Tableaux, or other custom dashboards.

Connecting Snowflake and Lightcast Data Shares can seem complicated, but setting up your data warehouse platforms will bring immense value to your organization. By following the steps outlined in this guide, you’ll be well on your way to integrating your systems effectively. If you need additional support or want to explore how Lightcast can help streamline your integration process, don’t hesitate to reach out.