Integration · Snowflake

Cortex AI as MCP tools.

Snowflake is the AI data cloud for enterprise. The Snowflake-managed MCP brings Cortex Analyst, Search, and Agents to MCP clients with native RBAC and OAuth.

Snowflake's first-party managed MCP server (October 2025 public preview) is native to Snowflake. No external infrastructure required. Tools cover Cortex Analyst (text-to-SQL on semantic views), Cortex Search (RAG on unstructured data), and Cortex Agents (multi-tool orchestration). OAuth plus RBAC respects existing Snowflake governance, so the agent only sees what the role allows. Plus Snowflake-Labs/mcp open source for self-hosted deployments.

Official MCPSnowflake-managed MCP plus Snowflake-Labs OSS for self-host.

What you can do via MCP

Example prompts the agent runs.

  • “Use Cortex Analyst on the revenue semantic view to show Q4 revenue by region.”

    Calls Cortex Analyst with the semantic view, generates the SQL behind the scenes, executes against Snowflake, returns the result rows.

  • “Run a Cortex Search across our customer support documents for tickets mentioning billing error.”

    Calls Cortex Search on the unstructured documents corpus, returns ranked passages with the source ticket IDs and relevance scores.

  • “Create a multi-step Cortex Agent that pulls last month's churned customer list, joins with usage data, and identifies common drop-off events.”

    Configures a Cortex Agent with the listed steps, executes the orchestration, returns the consolidated finding plus the underlying queries for audit.

  • “Show schemas in database PROD_ANALYTICS that I have access to.”

    Calls the schema-discovery tool, returns only schemas the OAuth role has SELECT on. RBAC is enforced at the warehouse, not at the agent layer.

  • “List the Cortex Knowledge Extensions from the Snowflake Marketplace currently installed.”

    Returns the installed extensions with their version, scope, and the documents or sources they index.

Snowflake · MCP

Cortex Analyst query via the Snowflake-managed MCP. The agent invokes the semantic view; Cortex generates the SQL; Snowflake executes.

Snowflake MCP
docs
# Snowflake MCP, called via the agent runtime
mcp.snowflake.cortex_analyst({
  semantic_view: "revenue_finance.q4_revenue_by_region_view",
  question: "Show Q4 revenue by region, sorted descending.",
  role: "ANALYST_ROLE",
  warehouse: "FINANCE_WH"
})

# Returns the generated SQL, the result rows, and the role's
# query history entry for audit.
One command sample showing how the agent talks to Snowflake. The MCP exposes the platform's primitives as tools; the agent translates the prompt into the right call.

MCP integration

Snowflake MCP server.

Server
Snowflake-managed MCP server (account-specific endpoint)
Auth
OAuth (preferred) or Programmatic Access Token (PAT) with least-privilege role
Hosting
Snowflake-managed (no external infrastructure) or self-hosted via Snowflake-Labs/mcp open source
  • Cortex Analyst: text-to-SQL on semantic views with full SQL audit trail
  • Cortex Search: RAG on unstructured documents with ranked passages
  • Cortex Agents: multi-tool orchestration for compound queries
  • Object management and SQL orchestration with RBAC inherited from Snowflake
  • Self-host alternative at Snowflake-Labs/mcp for VPC-resident deployments

Snowflake MCP docs

Visual demonstration

What this looks like in practice.

Snowflake· Schema1 database

PROD_ANALYTICS

  • REVENUE_FINANCE

    • FCT_INVOICES

      42M rows
      • INVOICE_IDstring
      • CUSTOMER_IDstring
      • AMOUNT_USDnumeric
      • ISSUED_ATtimestamp
      • REGIONstring

    • DIM_CUSTOMERS

      1.8M rows
      • CUSTOMER_IDstring
      • PLANstring
      • REGIONstring
      • ACTIVEboolean
Schema returned by the MCP under the analyst's role. Snowflake RBAC enforces visibility; columns the role lacks SELECT on do not appear in the response.
Snowflake· QueryCortex Analyst
 1-- Cortex Analyst generated SQL for question:
 2-- "Show Q4 revenue by region, sorted descending."
 3
 4SELECT
 5  region,
 6  SUM(amount_usd) AS revenue_usd
 7FROM prod_analytics.revenue_finance.fct_invoices
 8WHERE issued_at BETWEEN '2025-10-01' AND '2025-12-31'
 9GROUP BY region
10ORDER BY revenue_usd DESC;
5 rows
The SQL Cortex Analyst generated from a natural-language question against the semantic view. Full audit trail in the role's query history.

CLI alternative

SnowSQL CLI plus REST API for non-MCP workflows.

Snowflake exposes SnowSQL and a REST API as the canonical programmatic surfaces. For AI-driven analytics work the Snowflake-managed MCP is the primary interface; SnowSQL fills in for batch jobs, scheduled tasks, and any operational work the agent runtime is not the right place for. Self-hosted deployments use Snowflake-Labs/mcp.

Pairs with these skills

The PM data and analytics skill suite.

This integration pairs with the forthcoming product-analytics-setup, data-warehouse-experimentation skills. The skill landing pages and SKILL.md sources land in subsequent dispatches; cross-link hyperlinks are added when the skill pages ship.

Continue reading.