Contents
Introduction
A Snowflake data share is the simplest and easiest way for CDK to share Modern Retail suite data with you in a secure and efficient manner. Once a share is initiated by the CDK team you will see the shared tables appear in your Snowflake instance. You are then free to read the data as much as you wish (write access is not enabled) and can export the data to another platform of your choice if desired.
All data storage costs are paid for by CDK, but your own Snowflake account will be charged for your own compute (i.e. "query") costs. In our experience these costs are minimal and should not be a major concern.
Getting started
- Open a Snowflake account if you don't have one already
- Sign up here: https://signup.snowflake.com/
- Pick AWS (Amazon Web Services) as your hosting provider
- Pick US West (Oregon) as your hosting region (also shown as "us-west-2")
It is important that your Snowflake account uses AWS and is hosted in US West (Oregon). CDK does not support sharing with other cloud providers or regions as there are high data egress costs involved.
- Share your Snowflake organization and account identifier with the CDK team
- These values are shown in the bottom left corner of the Snowflake web console
- Telling us these values does not give CDK read access to your account, we can only use them to share data with you, they are not passwords
- Your organization by default will be a 7-character string of letters only (e.g. ABCDEFG)
- It is possible to set a custom organization name, although this is not the default (e.g. DEALERSHIPGROUP)
- Your account identifier is an 8-character string of 3 letters and 5 numbers (e.g. ABC12345)
If your Snowflake account is set up correctly in the right region, and you have shared a valid "organization" and "identifier" string with us, that is all you need to do.
Contact the Roadster team here: roadster.analytics@cdk.com
Tables (ERD)
CDK Digital Retail (previously known as Roadster) is currently available in Snowflake shares:
- CDK Digital Retail - Activities
- CDK Digital Retail - Agents
- CDK Digital Retail - Customers
- CDK Digital Retail - Dealers
- CDK Digital Retail - Google Analytics Hits
- CDK Digital Retail - Google Analytics Sessions
- Hits and Sessions will be available until 1st July 2024
- After that point GA4 data will be shared and will only contain ASC (Automotive Standards Council) events
- Richer customer journey data will be available as a paid add-on to your Snowflake share
- CDK Digital Retail - Leads
- CDK Digital Retail - Orders
CDK CRM data (previously known as Elead) will be available in Snowflake shares in Q2 2024.
FAQ
Q: We use *other cloud provider* for all our other cloud data products, why do we have to use AWS for this Snowflake instance?
A: Data egress fees for CDK would be prohibitively expensive if we supported all cloud providers. We have chosen to use the most popular provider (AWS), which simplifies the process and minimizes costs for most users.
Q: Is sharing our Snowflake organization and account identifiers safe to do over email?
A: Yes, these identifiers do not allow anyone to log into your account - they simply tell us who to share the data with. It's like sharing your home address but not the key to the door.