phData Launches the Provision Tool for Automated Snowflake Onboarding

A major bottleneck to getting value from a Snowflake Data Cloud environment is creating the databases, schemas, roles, and access grants that make up an ‘information architecture’. Creating, applying, and evolving this information architecture can be a major time-consuming, and error-prone process.

The Provision tool gives flexibility to phData customers, allowing them to define and apply their own information architecture in a standardized way. The Provision tool’s high-performance, template-driven engine can manage and enforce that architecture to quickly and automatically provision resources in Snowflake, even for the largest accounts. 

Additionally, the Provision tool can be integrated with popular ticketing systems like Jira or ServiceNow to allow self-service project creation and user access grants with existing enterprise approval processes.

The Provision tool is an upgraded version of our existing Snowflake resource management tool, Tram, that offers several simplifications and improvements. Tram has been successfully used for years by phData customers to manage their Snowflake environments; this new tool will improve that experience.

Some of the notable Provision tool improvements include:

• Full integration into our Toolkit CLI, allowing us to provide a consistent user experience across all of our tools.
• Simplified information architecture definition with Jinja templates.
• Simplified configuration.
• Improved resource create/destroy behavior, making it easy to destroy even individual objects.
• Improved resource validation for faster development and deployment.
• Improved error handling and user experience when developing complex information architectures.
• Multithreaded plan and apply for faster runtimes in very large Snowflake environments.
• A built-in local tutorial to make getting started easy.