Query a table in Snowflake Open Catalog using a third-party engine

This topic provides instructions for using a third-party query engine to query a table in Snowflake Open Catalog.

Prerequisites

Before you can query a table in Open Catalog, you must do the following:

Considerations for querying Snowflake-managed Apache Iceberg™ tables

If you use Snowflake and sync a Snowflake-managed Iceberg table to Open Catalog, be aware of the following considerations when querying the table in Open Catalog:

  • Unquoted identifiers: If you create a database, schema, or Iceberg table in Snowflake and give it a name that contains letters without enclosing the name in double quotes, you must specify the name in all caps when you reference it in Open Catalog. For example, if iceberg_tables.public.table1 is the name in Snowflake, use ICEBERG_TABLES.PUBLIC.TABLE1 in Open Catalog.

  • Double-quoted identifiers: If you create an object in Snowflake with the name in double quotes, when referencing the object in a query in Open Catalog, you must do the following:

    • Enclose the object name with backticks.

    • Specify the object name exactly as it appears in Open Catalog to account for any character that was rendered as a different character, when applicable.

    The following example shows the My 'Identifier' Snowflake identifier, which was created with double quotes, being referenced in a query in Open Catalog:

      spark.sql ("select * from `My+'Identifier'`.PUBLIC.TABLE1").show()
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    Open Catalog renders the space character in double-quoted Snowflake identifiers as +.

Example: Query a table

The following example code shows how to use Apache Spark to query the customers table in the catalog catalog1. The customers table is located under namespace1a, which is nested under the top-level namespace namespace1:

spark.sql("use catalog1").show()
spark.sql("use namespace1.namespace1a").show()
spark.sql("SELECT * FROM customers").show()
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