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URL: https://www.cdata.com/kb/tech/snowflake-jdbc-birt.rst

⇱ Design BIRT Reports on Snowflake Data

Design BIRT Reports on Snowflake Data

👁 Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Provide current Snowflake data to your embedded analytics.

The CData JDBC Driver for Snowflake integrates connectivity to Snowflake APIs into your data-driven Java applications. You can use the CData JDBC Driver for Snowflake with the BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tools) platform to create BIRT reports that reflect changes to your data in real time.

About Snowflake Data Integration

CData simplifies access and integration of live Snowflake data. Our customers leverage CData connectivity to:

  • Reads and write Snowflake data quickly and efficiently.
  • Dynamically obtain metadata for the specified Warehouse, Database, and Schema.
  • Authenticate in a variety of ways, including OAuth, OKTA, Azure AD, Azure Managed Service Identity, PingFederate, private key, and more.

Many CData users use CData solutions to access Snowflake from their preferred tools and applications, and replicate data from their disparate systems into Snowflake for comprehensive warehousing and analytics.

For more information on integrating Snowflake with CData solutions, refer to our blog: https://www.cdata.com/blog/snowflake-integrations.


Getting Started


  1. If you have not already done so, install the BIRT Framework plugin and the Database Development plugin for Eclipse.
  2. Click File -> New -> Report. The Report Design perspective is opened.
  3. In the Data Explorer, right-click Data Sources and click New Data Source.
  4. Select the Create from a Data Source Type in the Following List option and select JDBC Data Source.
  5. Click Manage Drivers and add the driver JAR, located in the lib subfolder of the installation folder.
  6. In the Database URL box, enter the JDBC URL containing the connection string.

    To connect to Snowflake:

    1. Set User and Password to your Snowflake credentials and set the AuthScheme property to PASSWORD or OKTA.
    2. Set URL to the URL of the Snowflake instance (i.e.: https://myaccount.snowflakecomputing.com).
    3. Set Warehouse to the Snowflake warehouse.
    4. (Optional) Set Account to your Snowflake account if your URL does not conform to the format above.
    5. (Optional) Set Database and Schema to restrict the tables and views exposed.
    6. (Optional) If MFA is enabled on your Snowflake account (via Duo Security), set MFACode to the passcode generated by your Duo authenticator app.

    See the Getting Started guide in the CData driver documentation for more information.

    Built-in Connection String Designer

    For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the Snowflake JDBC Driver. Either double-click the JAR file or execute the jar file from the command-line.

    java -jar cdata.jdbc.snowflake.jar

    Fill in the connection properties and copy the connection string to the clipboard.

    👁 Using the built-in connection string designer to generate a JDBC URL (Salesforce is shown.)

    When you configure the JDBC URL, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

    A typical JDBC URL is below:

    jdbc:snowflake:Authscheme=Password;URL=https://myaccount.snowflakecomputing.com;User=Admin;Password=test123;Server=localhost;Database=Northwind;Warehouse=TestWarehouse;Account=Tester1;MFACode=YourMFACode
  7. Right-click the Data Sets folder and select the JDBC data source for Snowflake.
  8. In the resulting dialog, build the SELECT query to be used to retrieve the data for the report. This article uses the following query: 
    SELECT Id, ProductName FROM Products
  9. In the Palette, drag a Chart onto the editor. The chart wizard is displayed.
  10. After selecting the chart type, drag columns onto the chart fields on the Select Data tab.
  11. Click Run -> View Report -> In Web Viewer to view the report.

Your BIRT reports can now pick up any updates to Snowflake data. 👁 A BIRT report that can be refreshed on demand. (Salesforce is shown.)

To publish the report to your application server, add the driver JAR to the BIRT Viewer's classpath. For more information, see the CData KB for guides to deploying the JDBC Driver on Java application servers.