Account identifiers¶

Using an account name as an identifier¶

The account identifier for an account in your organization takes one of the following forms, depending on where and how you use the identifier:

• Specifying the account name when connecting to Snowflake

• Specifying the fully qualified account name in a SQL statement

[connections]
[connections.myconnection]
account = "myorganization-myaccount"

Finding the organization and account name for an account¶

To find the organization and account name for an account, you can use Snowsight or SQL.

Snowsight:

1. Open the account selector and review the list of accounts that you previously signed in to.

   

2. Locate the account for which you want to copy the account name.

3. Hover over the account to view additional details, and then select the copy icon to copy the account identifier in the format orgname.account_name to your clipboard.

   

Note

The account identifier is copied in the format orgname.account_name, which is used for SQL commands and operations.

If you need to use the account identifier with a Snowflake driver (for example, JDBC or ODBC), you need to replace the period (.) with a hyphen (-) so the identifier is formatted as orgname-account_name.

SQL:

• To retrieve the organization of the current account, call the CURRENT_ORGANIZATION_NAME function.

• To retrieve the name of the current account, call the CURRENT_ACCOUNT_NAME function.

For example, to get the account identifier for configuring a client, driver, or library to connect to Snowflake, run:

SELECT CURRENT_ORGANIZATION_NAME() || '-' || CURRENT_ACCOUNT_NAME();

Copy

Organization and account names¶

Using an account locator as an identifier¶

Each Snowflake account is hosted on a cloud platform in a geographical region.

The region determines where the data in the account is stored and where the compute resources used by the account are provisioned.

When using an account locator to identify an account, the locator by itself is not always sufficient to identify the account. Depending on the region and cloud platform for the account, additional segments may be required, in the form of:

account_locator.cloud_region_id or

account_locator.cloud_region_id.cloud or

account_locator.gov_compliance.cloud_region_id.cloud

Where:

• cloud_region_id is the identifier for the cloud region (dictated by the cloud platform).

• cloud is the identifier for the cloud platform (aws, azure, or gcp).

• compliance is for SnowGov regions only and specifies the level of U.S. government compliance supported by the region (fhplus or dod).

For example, if your account locator is xy12345:

• If the account is located in the AWS US West (Oregon) region, no additional segments are required and the URL would be xy12345.snowflakecomputing.com.

• If the account is located in the AWS US East (Ohio) region, additional segments are required and the URL would be xy12345.us-east-2.aws.snowflakecomputing.com.

For a complete list of regions and locator formats, see Non-VPS Account Locator Formats by Cloud Platform and Region (in this topic).

Finding the region and locator for an account¶

If you can connect to your Snowflake account, you can query the following context functions to identify the region and account locator for the Snowflake account you are connected to:

• CURRENT_REGION retrieves the region in which your account is located.

• CURRENT_ACCOUNT retrieves the account locator.

If you are unable to connect to Snowflake, contact the Snowflake administrator for your account to retrieve this information.

Finding the account locator format for a VPS account¶

If your Snowflake Edition is VPS, the account locator format uses different naming conventions than the accounts for other Snowflake Editions. This results in a different structure for the hostnames and URLs used to access VPS accounts.

For details, please contact Snowflake Support or your Snowflake representative.

As an alternative, you can use the preferred format of organization_name-account_name as your account identifier. This format works for accounts that use the VPS edition. For details, see Format 1 (preferred): Account name in your organization (in this topic).

Non-VPS account locator formats by cloud platform and region¶

The following table lists the account locator formats across all the supported non-VPS regions, including whether the account locator for a given region requires additional segments:

If your account locator is xy12345:

Region IDs¶

Because each cloud platform utilizes different conventions and formats for naming their regions, Snowflake assigns a canonical ID to each Snowflake Region that uniquely identifies it across all the cloud platforms and their regions.

If the Organizations feature is enabled, specifying the Snowflake Region ID as part of an account identifier is required when you create a new account, as well as when you configure replication and failover.

The following table displays the complete list of Snowflake Region IDs:

Region groups¶

A region group is a group of Snowflake Regions that offer similar security controls, isolation, and compliance. The region group to which a Snowflake Region belongs differs depending on the region:

• All Snowflake multi-tenant commercial regions (across all the supported cloud platforms) are in the same shared/general PUBLIC group.

• Each Snowflake multi-tenant government region is in a separate group specific to the region.

• Each single-tenant Virtual Private Snowflake (VPS) is in a separate region group specific to the VPS. If your organization has more than one VPS, you can have one VPS per region group or multiple VPSs can share the same region group.

Specifying the region group as part of an account identifier is required when you want to create accounts in different region groups.