The Custom Data Warehouse by Arbor is a tailored Snowflake warehouse for centralised data reporting, available through the Enterprise package for MATs. The product allows you to import your own data sources into Snowflake as well as leveraging its analytic capabilities to reduce the load on end BI tools. Due to the complexity and maintenance required we suggest that you have strong support in data management to use this product.
The warehouse operates under a fair use policy, allowing monitoring of credit usage and providing support options for users.
The Custom Data Warehouse is your own bespoke Snowflake warehouse managed by Arbor, which enables reporting on data from all your sources in one place. This is offered in partnership with Snowflake and AWS, and is part of the Powered by Snowflake programme.
Please note, our Custom Data Warehouse comes with a fair use policy.
About Custom Data Warehouse
Snowflake core concepts
There are plenty of resources available to help you familiarise yourself with Snowflake as well as a detailed Help Centre. Please note that these resources are not managed by Arbor.
- Zero to Snowflake in 90 Minutes - Free Snowflake introduction course.
- Snowflake Fundamentals - A 4 day course to learn Snowflake fundamentals.
- Data Governance Workshop - A 1 day workshop.
Snowflake also offer custom training. Please reach out to Snowflake directly for further details.
Purchasing the connector
The Custom Data Warehouse is available as part of our Enterprise package for MATs. It is not possible to be purchased as a standalone feature, and is not available for schools.
To discuss your upgrade options, get in contact at customersales@arbor-education.com
Accessing your Custom Data Warehouse
Once you've purchased the feature and are ready to use it our team will set up your Custom Data Warehouse. We'll send some useful documentation links and video resources to help you get started. You'll also get the credentials sent to your nominated contact. They will be able to create additional users following the steps outlined below.
Note: Snowflake will be enforcing Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) on Service accounts in the near future. You can use either Passcode, Authenticator or Duo to manage this.
If you create a dedicated BI user to service a BI tool you'll need to follow additional steps to ensure a smoother experience handling MFA on these to reduce the number of authentication requests.
- For PowerBI you have the option to install and setup Snowflake's ODBC Connector.
- For Google Looker Studio you can use Key Pair Authentication.
Set up other users (Optional)
If you have the custom_warehouse_admin role, you can use the create_user function to create credentials for other users. When doing so you can give them one of these roles:
- DATA_READER - Read access to data, use of Default Warehouse (COMPUTE_WH)
- DATA_WRITER - As above, plus write access and ability to create databases
- CUSTOM_WAREHOUSE_ADMIN - User creation and resource monitor, as above plus access to resource monitoring, and the ability to monitor and operate on the default warehouse
CALL CUSTOM_WAREHOUSE.CORE.CREATE_USER('example_email@example.com','DATA_READER');
Top Tip: The user credentials will be returned onscreen to the person who has called the function. The user will be prompted to change their password and setup MFA when they login.
Using the Custom Data Warehouse
You can now use the Custom Data Warehouse! You can access all of our modelled views for MIS data as well as Benchmarks and some National Datasets such as IDACI. If you have purchased additional data connectors you'll also see them here.
You can use any of Snowflake's existing data connectors to bring additional data from other sources into your warehouse. To do this you'll need to add a Database (you can't add directly to the Arbor domain of CUSTOM_WAREHOUSE) using either CREATE commands or directly in the UI.
Monitoring Usage
You can use the Show Resource Monitors feature to monitor your credit usage. Our fair usage policy is 1200 Snowflake Credits per Year. This corresponds to 5 hours of query execution time per day, for 20 days per month.
Depending on your setup, you will also receive automatic reminders when you:
- reach 80% of the daily limit
- reach the daily limit of 5 credits to notify you that you are blocked from further queries today
- reach 50% of your monthly limit
- reach 80% of your monthly limit
- have a 2 Hour query timeout
How to get support
- For questions about using a data warehouse, contact Snowflake.
- If you have any issues with data from Arbor, contact the Arbor Support Team if supported by Arbor and reference code 1004, or contact your Support Partner if not supported by Arbor.
You can also post in the Arbor HQ for support from other Schools and MATs: Data and BI on Arbor HQ
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