phData, Inc. announced the launch of Traverse, the first application of its kind to help Snowflake users and administrators to better understand role hierarchy and privileges in the Snowflake Data Cloud. It provides a graphical, drillable view, clearly showing users, roles, databases, schemas, warehouses, and their relationships.
“We are very excited to bring this free tool to the market and help Snowflake users get their work done faster and more efficiently,” said Brock Noland, VP of Internal Engineering at phData. “Traverse makes it easier to understand, use, and fix the privileges in Snowflake while helping individual users see how their data can be accessed and by whom.”
Historically, creating and auditing privileges in Snowflake with many users was extremely difficult and tedious, especially for organizations with sensitive data. Gathering information on user, role, and object privileges would often require writing complex SQL queries.
Traverse works by gathering account information within Snowflake and turning it into a graph that shows a visual representation of any particular user’s Snowflake account. With Traverse, every Snowflake user can easily answer questions like:
- What data does my user have access to?
- Who has write access to my project’s databases?
- Which users have access to my schema, and how?
- Which users inherit privileged roles like ACCOUNTADMIN or SYSADMIN?
- What does the role hierarchy look like?
“My sincere hope is that this free tool helps Snowflake users demystify who has access to what in the platform,” said Brock.