Recently, we added more connectivity options to Omnata sync to help you connect to databases like SQL Server, Postgres, with more on the way. Databases, unlike SaaS endpoints, have may more deployment options at each customer site. In addition, databases are all structured differently for different use cases and as such, only certain sync strategies are available for replication.

With Omnata Sync we have core design principles:

• Leverage the power of the underlying platform (Snowflake)

• Do not handle data or credentials

• Flexibility and pragmatism

Omnata Sync’s databases connectors follow a pull-based architecture, where it reaches through from Snowflake to your database. This enables us to support the full range of replication strategies. For SQL Server, you can replicate data using CDC, Change Tracking, directly query tables using a high-watermark or full-refresh strategy.

New connectivity options

In our latest version of Omnata, we have expanded the support of different connectivity options to databases.

Existing options:

• ngrok tunnel

The new options:

• AWS Privatelink

• Azure Private Link

• Direct

Secure tunnels powered by ngrok

In our first release of the SQL Server plugin, we needed a way to connect from Snowflake to private networks without needing to open up firewalls.

For this, we partnered with ngrok, the best in-class provider of site-to-site connectivity. ngrok enabled us to deploy a trustless, secure tunnels between customers’ Snowflake accounts and their databases whether hosted in the cloud, or on-premise. ngrok is trusted by the biggest names in technology, is SOC 2 compliant and Omnata's architecture is endorsed by ngrok's engineers.

The main benefit of ngrok is that it supports any Snowflake edition, region and cloud and can connect to any type of database deployment you have. The ngrok subscription is included in your Omnata native app billing.

To learn more about how we use ngrok in our Snowflake Native App, read this post.

AWS and Azure Private Link

Last month, Snowflake released underlying platform improvements for native apps to support private link for Azure and AWS.

What are the prerequisites?

• A Snowflake Business Critical Account

• A matching cloud region; AWS to AWS and Azure to Azure.

• Some help from the DevOps team

This improvement is two-fold, Streamlit UIs are now supported for customers using Snowflake behind private link connections, and, External Access Integrations to endpoints inside your cloud VPC can route through the cloud provider’s private network.

For databases connectors, this means you can connect to a SQL Server or Postgres databases without egressing data from your cloud en route to Snowflake. This reduces costs and increases performance and security.

In addition, you can reach on-premise networks through your cloud using Private link if you already have a VPN or other network connection between your cloud and on-premise network. So, Omnata can connect to an on-premise databases via this connection route.

Our app will soon guide the user through the steps to configure private link connections on both Azure and AWS, which varies quite a bit between the two.

If you would like to learn more, reach out to us.

Direct

Finally, we've added a direct connection method which is only useful in a small number of use cases, but where a secure connection tunnel is not warranted. If you have a publicly accessible database, or one where security policy is not high, you can simply connect directly using the database credentials.

How do I decide which is best?

You can follow this decision tree to help you decide which is best.