Unlocking New Insights – Building and Sharing Data Products with Snowflake Marketplace

In our last blog post, we laid the groundwork for a high-performing data warehouse by mastering data modeling and clustering. But once your data is clean, fast, and reliable, what’s next? How do you securely share these valuable assets with other teams, partners, or even the world?

This guide is about elevating your work from a backend model to a front-and-center data product. We’ll explore how to turn your data into a shareable asset and how Snowflake makes this process remarkably simple and secure.

What Is the Snowflake Marketplace?

Think of it as an app store, but for data. The Snowflake Marketplace is a central hub where organizations can:

• Discover and access third-party datasets from hundreds of providers.

• Publish their own internal data for teams across the company.

• Monetize proprietary datasets by making them commercially available.

Unlike traditional data sharing methods that rely on slow and cumbersome FTP transfers or API maintenance, the Marketplace is powered by Snowflake Secure Data Sharing. This means no data is ever copied. When you access a dataset, you are querying it live, directly from the provider's account. It's always up-to-date, and you don't pay for duplicated storage.

How Data Sharing Works in Snowflake

The ecosystem is built on two simple roles:

1. Data Consumers: Any Snowflake user can be a consumer. You can browse listings, review documentation, and get instant, read-only access to data. The shared data appears in your account as a new database, ready to be joined with your own tables and dbt models seamlessly.

2. Data Providers: Any organization with a full (non-trial) Snowflake account can be a provider. You can publish listings, complete with documentation and usage examples, and decide exactly who gets to see your data.

Public vs. Private Listings: Controlling Access

Snowflake gives providers fine-grained control over who can access their data products.

• Public Listings: These are discoverable by anyone on the Snowflake Marketplace. They can be offered for free or monetized through subscription or usage-based models. This is a powerful way to build new revenue streams from your existing data assets.

• Private Listings: These are shared only with specific Snowflake accounts. This is the perfect solution for enabling secure collaboration with partners, VIP clients, or even other teams within your own organization.

The Rise of the Internal Marketplace

You don’t have to sell data to benefit from this technology. Many data teams now use private listings to create an internal data marketplace. Imagine being able to:

• Share a unified customer_360 table with the Marketing and Sales teams.

• Give the Finance department direct access to governed, always-fresh bookings data from your dbt project.

• Let the Product team query aggregated usage metrics without needing new pipelines.

With an internal marketplace, data consumers across the enterprise get consistent, reliable data with zero duplication and zero ETL effort.

Why This Matters for Analytics Engineers

As analytics engineers, we don’t just build models; we build data products. A truly great data product is discoverable, documented, governed, and easily queryable by non-engineers.

Using Snowflake’s sharing capabilities, you can expose your work cleanly and securely—without managing APIs, S3 buckets, or Excel exports. This removes friction and ensures the valuable assets you build get into the hands of the people who need them most. If you’ve built a great data model in dbt, it deserves to be shared.

Core Benefits of Sharing via Snowflake

• No ETL Required: Data is live. No pipelines to build or maintain. Just share.

• Always Fresh: Consumers see the latest version of the data instantly.

• Secure by Design: Built on Snowflake’s robust access control and encryption.

• Cost-Efficient: Consumers pay only for the compute they use to query the data, not for storing a second copy.

• Governed Access: As a provider, you maintain full control and can monitor usage or revoke access at any time.

Getting Started: Your First Steps as a Consumer

It takes only a minute to get your first dataset.

1. From the Snowsight UI, navigate to the Data Products tab.

2. Search for datasets that interest you (e.g., weather, financial indicators, demographics).

3. Click "Get" on a listing.

4. The data instantly appears as a new database in your account, ready to query.

You can immediately preview tables, join the data with your own dbt models, and use it in dashboards, forecasts, and reports.

Key Considerations Before You Share Your First Data Product

Now that you understand how to consume and benefit from shared data, you might be inspired to become a provider yourself. Before you publish your first listing, it’s crucial to think like a product owner. A successful data product is more than just a table; it's a reliable, well-documented asset.

Here are the key elements to consider:

1. Treat the Data as a Product, Not a Table
The data you share should be clean, modeled, and easy to understand. Don't share raw, unprocessed tables. Instead, offer a well-structured view or a final model from your dbt project. This ensures your consumers get immediate value without having to perform complex cleaning or transformations themselves. Your goal is to provide a finished product, not a starting point.

2. Invest in Clear Documentation and Metadata
A data product without documentation is like a device without a manual. Invest time in writing clear, concise descriptions for your tables and columns. Your listing should include:

• A summary of what the data represents.

• Definitions for key columns.

• Example queries showing how to use the data.

• Information on the data's refresh frequency.

This metadata is critical for building trust and enabling self-service for your consumers.

3. Define Your Access and Governance Policy
Before sharing, decide who your audience is.

• Is this for a specific internal team or an external partner? A private listing is the best choice.

• Is this a commercial dataset for public consumption? A public listing on the Marketplace is the way to go.

Establish clear rules for who can get access and under what conditions. Having a defined governance plan from the start prevents confusion and ensures your data is shared securely and appropriately.

4. Commit to Maintenance and Freshness
When you share a data product, you are making a promise to your consumers that the data will be reliable and up-to-date. Be prepared to maintain the underlying pipelines and communicate any changes, such as schema modifications or adjustments to the refresh schedule. A well-maintained product is a trusted product.

Thinking through these elements will transform your dataset from a simple table into a valuable, trusted data product that empowers users and drives real business impact.

Data sharing is no longer a nice-to-have; it's a core competency for modern data teams. With Snowflake, you can do it securely, scalably, and without building new infrastructure.