About Workday Live Data Query for Snowflake¶

Note

Workday Live Data Query for Snowflake is in Early Adopter (EA) for Workday and in Preview for Snowflake. To request access, contact your Workday account representative.

Workday Live Data Query (LDQ) gives you real-time SQL access to Workday business data from Snowflake — without any ETL pipelines or data replication. Data stays in Workday; Snowflake queries it on demand through a Python connector running in a Snowflake Notebook.

This integration is ideal for organizations that need up-to-date workforce and talent data inside Snowflake for analytics, reporting, or AI workloads, without the overhead and latency of a traditional data pipeline.

How it works¶

Workday LDQ uses a Trino-over-HTTPS connection to query the Workday Unified Data Catalog directly from a Snowflake Notebook. Authentication uses JWT Bearer OAuth2, with credentials stored securely as Snowflake Secrets.

Snowflake Notebook
  └── Python (workday_ldq wheel)
        └── JWT Bearer OAuth2 → Workday Token Endpoint
              └── Trino-over-HTTPS → Workday Live Data Query service
                    └── Returns rows from Workday Unified Data Catalog

Because the data isn’t copied into Snowflake, queries always reflect the current state of your Workday tenant.

Available data¶

In EA, the integration supports Workforce and Talent objects, including:

worker
worker_contact_data
job_profile

Support for Financials, Payroll, and Student objects is planned for general availability (GA).

Prerequisites¶

Before starting, ensure you have the following from your Workday administrator:

Item	Example
ISU username	`snowflake_ldq_user`
Client ID	`YTg4YjRk...` (base64 string)
Token endpoint	`https://<host>/ccx/oauth2/<tenant>/token`
Private key file	`private-key.pem` (RSA 2048, PEM format)
Workday host	`impl-services1.<tenant>.myworkday.com`

You also need:

ACCOUNTADMIN (or equivalent) role in Snowflake to complete the initial setup.
The ldq_python_client-*.whl wheel file, available from the Workday Community portal.

Note

The steps in this guide use WORKDAY_LDQ_TEST as the base name for all Snowflake objects (for example, WORKDAY_LDQ_TEST database, WORKDAY_LDQ_TEST_ROLE role, WORKDAY_LDQ_TEST_USER user, WORKDAY_LDQ_TEST_EAI integration). Replace these with names that match your organization’s naming conventions, and substitute consistently throughout all steps.

Setup checklist¶

Order	Task	Description	Persona
1	Set up Snowflake for Workday Live Data Query	Create the Snowflake objects required for LDQ: role, user, database, schema, stage, network rule, secret, and external access integration.	Snowflake account administrator
2	Connect to Workday and query data from Snowflake	Create a Snowflake Notebook, install the Workday connector, configure credentials, and run your first queries against Workday data.	Snowflake account administrator or data engineer
3	Use Cortex Code with Workday data	Use Cortex Code to write queries, analyze results, and build visualizations on top of Workday data.	Data engineer or analyst

If you run into errors, see Troubleshoot Workday Live Data Query.