Snowflake Admin Series: Account Replication and Failover, a great relief …Part 2

In this blog we are going to see continuation of our hot topic from the Snowflake Admin Series: Account Replication and Failover, a great relief ... This is part 2 of a multipart blog. If you had not read my Admin series, Account Replication and failover , a great relief …Part 1, then I would recommend you to have a look to get full picture of Account replication.

What are the use-cases where Account Replication can be helpful?

What will happen if my target account is on lower edition than my source(Business Critical Edition)?

Snowflake displays an error message if the primary replication group is in a Business Critical (or higher) account but one or more of the accounts approved for replication are on lower editions. Business Critical Edition is intended for Snowflake accounts with extremely sensitive data.

You will get an error message if your primary replication/failover group is in a Business Critical (or higher) account but one or more of the accounts approved for replication are on lower editions. Generally we use Business Critical Edition for extremely sensitive data.

You can bypass the above check by using Accountadmin role or role which has CREATE REPLICATION GROUP/CREATE FAILOVER GROUP or OWNERSHIP privilege. This can be done by including the IGNORE EDITION CHECK clause.

What if my source account holds PHI data and my target account doesn't have BA agreement?

The primary replication or failover group is in a Business Critical (or higher) account and a signed business associate agreement is in place to store PHI data in the account per HIPAA and HITRUST CSF regulations, but no such agreement is in place for one or more of the accounts enabled for replication, regardless if they are Business Critical (or higher) accounts.

What all are the consideration we have to take into account for account replication?

There is a detailed snowflake documentation to cover this topic and I would recommend referring documentation as this consideration may change/updated in due course.

Now comes the most interesting part of blog, yes how to do this account replication practically. Before going there I want to set up the context of my demo and what all I want to capture in my demo. If you see below visualization and read the agenda than you will understand what we are going to expect as end result.

Below is the agenda for my demo:

1. We will cover how to set up the primary account replication- readiness demo.
2. We will see how we can do Cross cloud & Cross region account replication using Failover group. All 3 account in demo are with 3 different cloud provider and regions.
3. How we will do failover to secondary account in case of disaster event.
4. Validate certain fact like whether we can do dml operation at primary vs secondary1 vs secondary 2.
5. Validate if said account objects gets replicated or not?
6. See how we can add new objects for replication later on if required.
7. How to suspend/resume/drop failover group.
8. We will see how we link the object if it's already deployed in secondary account using pipeline or automation. Specially, when you are transition from Database Replication to Account replication than this part will be very useful. Must watch this video.
9. How to replicate using Replication Group instead of Failover group. What is the difference between them?
10. How to replicate Task & Stream which was earlier not available with database replication.

I believe this demo will be going to a bit detailed and would recommend you to please see all video to its full without skipping or fast forwarding as I had captured lots of practical detail in my demo.

I had tried to split all the activity in small buckets and tried to explain in a sequence. Let’s start with demo.

How can we enable replication for account ?

This is very important and simple steps. This is a prerequisite to start with replication.

Let’s set up some inventory/objects in Snowflake account at database and account level. See below demo how and what I did as part of account replication.

Above 2 videos cover our very Agenda#1 :We will cover how to set up the primary account replication- readiness demo.

I would like to conclude this blog here else it will be too big and people will lose interest.Stay tuned for next blog where I had covered the rest of the demo.

Hope this blog helps you to get insight into the Snowflake Admin Series. Feel free to ask a question in the comment section if you have any doubts regarding this. Give a clap if you like the blog. Stay connected to see many more such cool stuff. Thanks for your support.

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