As a company, we ran into an interesting issue this week where our favorite datawarehouse, Snowflake, wasn’t connecting to Tableau Desktop. This was only happening with some of our employees – specifically those not using PCs.
After a lot of troubleshooting, we discovered that Macs currently running macOS Ventura couldn’t recognize the driver needed to access Snowflake. Obviously, that is a huge problem when considering data security.
Luckily, for those of you on MacOS, and specifically Ventura, we have found the fix to the Snowflake driver.
To be clear, this solution was not easy to find at all. It was a full day of research on Snowflake and Tableau forums with trial and error on a bunch of different options. The solution that worked for us (detailed below), is about #15 down on this link by someone named Wang Szeto: https://community.tableau.com/s/question/0D58b00009gWXTtCAO/snowflake-odbc-driver-doesnt-get-connected-to-tableau-desktop (there are few folks with that name on LinkedIn and we didn’t want to tag the wrong person but if you are out there Wang, please take a bow and our thanks for help with this!)
Crucially: You do NOT have to downgrade your MacOS and expose yourself to unnecessary vulnerabilities! For whatever reason, the Snowflake installer doesn’t make all of the necessary changes to your odbc files when you upgrade to the Ventura OS.
Here are 4 easy steps to manually make those changes and save yourself a lot of stress:
- Download and install the universal package (not arm64) from here : https://sfc-repo.snowflakecomputing.com/odbc/mac64/index.html
- Go to ~/Library/ODBC/odbcinst.ini and copy/paste the following text into this ini file:
[ODBC Drivers]
Snowflake = Installed
[Snowflake]
Driver = /opt/snowflake/snowflakeodbc/lib/universal/libSnowflake.dylib
- Go to /Library/ODBC/odbcinst.ini and copy/paste the following text into this ini file:
[ODBC Drivers]
Snowflake = Installed
[Snowflake]
Driver = /opt/snowflake/snowflakeodbc/lib/universal/libSnowflake.dylib
- Go to /Library/ODBC/odbc.ini and copy/paste the following text into this ini file:
[ODBC Data Sources]
Snowflake = Snowflake
[Snowflake]
Driver = /opt/snowflake/snowflakeodbc/lib/universal/libSnowflake.dylib
Once all 4 steps are done, when Tableau opens up and you click on Snowflake, it should point to the universal drivers.
Happy vizzing!