Snowflake - Querying External Table from Tableau

Question

I am trying to use the Snowflake connector in Tableau to query an external Snowflake table.

I cannot see the external table in the list of all tables on the left pane in Tableau (only regular Snowflake tables), so I have tried to pull from the external table using SQL.

Running this from the Snowflake site gets me the contents of the external table:

select * from EXTERNAL_TABLE_NAME;

Running the same from the "New Custom SQL" dialog in Tableau's Snowflake connector gets me this:

SQL compilation error: Object 'EXTERNAL_TABLE_NAME' does not exist or not authorized.

I also tried the following:

select from @DATABASE_NAME.SCHEMA_NAME.STAGE_NAME.EXTERNAL_TABLE_NAME

...which gets me: SQL compilation error: Object does not exist, or operation cannot be performed.

Any thoughts on what I can do to get this to work? I don't think it is a permissioning issue because I am using the same account to auth in Tableau as I am on the Snowflake website.

I'm guessing that I simply need to do a better job pointing to the location where the external table is, but I can't figure it out.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

Looks like this is a deeper permissioning issue that I will have to resolve with our Snowflake admin. I was able to pull to Tableau from an external Snowflake table successfully using a different ROLE and DATABASE, so marking this resolved.