Connecting Snowflake to Esri Coming Soon

Earlier this year, I wrote a brief post about how to connect Snowflake to Esri’s ArcGIS. That worked for version 10.4. When we upgraded to 10.7, the ODBC connection appeared to connect to Snowflake but wouldn’t actually retrieve any data. Today, I finally was able to connect w/ some Esri folks to learn about their plan for connecting to Snowflake and thought I’d share what I learned.

Esri will be releasing a new version of Insights in March, 2021 that will have a built-in JDBC driver that will connect to Snowflake. They have other teams that are working on drivers for the GeoDB and ArcGIS Pro. Given the complexity of those applications, it’s looking like they won’t be releasing their Snowflake support until end of 2021. That was an unofficial estimate and could be pushed out further.

In the meantime, you can connect to Snowflake using PySQL. In Enterprise version 10.8.1, they have a managed Jupyter notebook environment. We’re on 10.7 in our organization so I may not get to play around with that just yet.

It is nice to know that Esri is actively working on their connectors to Snowflake!