Creating a Session for Snowpark Python¶

To use Snowpark in your application, you need to create a session. For convenience in writing code, you can also import the names of packages and objects.

Creating a Session¶

The first step in using the library is establishing a session with the Snowflake database.

Import the Session class.

from snowflake.snowpark import Session

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To authenticate, you use the same mechanisms that the Snowflake Connector for Python supports.

Establish a session with a Snowflake database using the same parameters (for example, the account name, user name, etc.) that you use in the connect function in the Snowflake Connector for Python. For more information, see the parameters for the connect function in the Python Connector API documentation.

Connect by using the `connections.toml` file¶

To add credentials in a connections configuration file:

In a text editor, open the connections.toml file for editing. For example, to open the file in the Linux vi editor:
```
vi connections.toml
```
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Add a new Snowflake connection definition.

You can generate the basic settings for the TOML configuration file in Snowsight. For information, see Configuring a client, driver, library, or third-party application to connect to Snowflake.

For example, to add a Snowflake connection called myconnection with the account myaccount, user johndoe, and password credentials, as well as database information, add the following lines to the configuration file:
```
[myconnection]
account = "myaccount"
user = "jdoe"
password = "******"
warehouse = "my-wh"
database = "my_db"
schema = "my_schema"
```
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Connection definitions support the same configuration options available in the snowflake.connector.connect method.

Optional: Add more connections, as shown:

[myconnection_test]
account = "myaccount"
user = "jdoe-test"
password = "******"
warehouse = "my-test_wh"
database = "my_test_db"
schema = "my_schema"

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Save changes to the file.
In your Python code, supply connection name to snowflake.connector.connect and then add it to session, similar to the following:
```
session = Session.builder.config("connection_name", "myconnection").create()
```
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For more information, see configuration file.

Connect by specifying connection parameters¶

Construct a dictionary (dict) containing the names and values of these parameters (e.g. account, user, role, warehouse, database, schema, etc.).

To create the session:

Create a Python dictionary (dict) containing the names and values of the parameters for connecting to Snowflake.
Pass this dictionary to the Session.builder.configs method to return a builder object that has these connection parameters.
Call the create method of the builder to establish the session.

The following example uses a dict containing connection parameters to create a new session:

connection_parameters = {
  "account": "<your snowflake account>",
  "user": "<your snowflake user>",
  "password": "<your snowflake password>",
  "role": "<your snowflake role>",  # optional
  "warehouse": "<your snowflake warehouse>",  # optional
  "database": "<your snowflake database>",  # optional
  "schema": "<your snowflake schema>",  # optional
}

new_session = Session.builder.configs(connection_parameters).create()

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For the account parameter, use your account identifier. Note that the account identifier does not include the snowflakecomputing.com suffix.

Note

This example shows you one way to create a session but there are several other ways that you can connect, including: the default authenticator, single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), key pair authentication, using a proxy server, and OAuth. For more information, see Connecting to Snowflake with the Python Connector.

Using single sign-on (SSO) through a web browser¶

If you have configured Snowflake to use single sign-on (SSO), you can configure your client application to use browser-based SSO for authentication.

Construct a dictionary (dict) containing the names and values of these parameters (e.g. account, user, role, warehouse, database, authenticator, etc.).

To create the session:

Create a Python dictionary (dict) containing the names and values of the parameters for connecting to Snowflake.
Pass this dictionary to the Session.builder.configs method to return a builder object that has these connection parameters.
Call the create method of the builder to establish the session.

The following example uses a dict containing connection parameters to create a new session. Set the authenticator option to externalbrowser.

from snowflake.snowpark import Session
connection_parameters = {
  "account": "<your snowflake account>",
  "user": "<your snowflake user>",
  "role":"<your snowflake role>",
  "database":"<your snowflake database>",
  "schema":"<your snowflake schema",
  "warehouse":"<your snowflake warehouse>",
  "authenticator":"externalbrowser"
}
session = Session.builder.configs(connection_parameters).create()

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Closing a Session¶

If you no longer need to use a session for executing queries and you want to cancel any queries that are currently running, call the close method of the Session object. For example:

new_session.close()

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Creating a Session for Snowpark Python¶