Declarative Sharing in Native Apps: Limitations¶

Declarative sharing is a feature in Snowflake Native Apps that allows providers to quickly define and share objects across multiple databases using a simple YAML configuration file. While this feature significantly simplifies data sharing workflows, it has limitations that providers should understand before implementation.

Supported Object Types¶

Declarative sharing supports these object types:

Tables
Secure Views (including materialized views)
Notebooks

All other object types are not supported for sharing in Declarative Sharing in Native Apps.

Shared Objects¶

Object limit: A maximum of 1,000 objects can be defined in the shared content section of the manifest.yml file. To raise this limit, contact Snowflake Support.

Notebook Limitations¶

Read-only for consumers: Consumers can’t edit provider notebooks in place, nor can they clone them.
Network access: Notebooks cannot access external endpoints or consumer data when running in customer accounts.
Specialized libraries: Geospatial and other 3rd party libraries aren’t guaranteed to work out-of-the-box in notebooks.
External dependencies: Declarative Sharing apps have limited support for external libraries (Snowflake Anaconda channel and Python files in code stage.)
Non-interactive execution: Notebooks that are part of native applications cannot be executed non-interactively by worksheets or SQL commands.

Security and Access Control¶

Role definition: All application roles referenced in the shared content must be predefined in the roles field in the manifest.
Object-level Roles: Object roles must be subsets of their parent schema roles.
Missing role validation: Validating the manifest returns an error if roles referenced in the sharing configuration don’t exist.
Minimum privileges: The provider role committing the shared_content.yaml file must have at least the same privileges on shared objects as those being granted to consumers.
No REFERENCE_USAGE required: Unlike traditional data sharing, providers don’t need to grant REFERENCE_USAGE privileges to the application package.

Migration & Compatibility¶

Declarative Sharing migration: Migration support for switching from data shares to declarative sharing in native apps is unavailable.

Naming and Configuration Constraints¶

No wildcards: Object names must be explicitly specified; wildcard or regular expression matching is not supported.
Name collision prevention: No two shared objects can have the same DOMAIN and name.
Schema mapping: Schema mapping is not supported. Overlapping schema names from multiple databases are not allowed.

Monitoring¶

Auditability: Declarative Native Apps don’t provide monitoring resources (such as audit trails) to let the provider receive information from the consumer about how the shared data is being used. If a consumer has compliance or regulatory requirements that require auditing, the consumer must work with the provider to implement their own monitoring solutions.