Microsoft Fabric - Snowflake Database Item

In Manage Connections and Gateways, Snowflake connections do allow you to specify a Role name. However, for Snowflake Database items, this value is not actually honoured at runtime. The UI hints at this, but it’s easy to miss.

The key line is right above the role field: “Advanced options are used for test connection only. Items that use this connection must specify these options in queries.” That means the role works for Test connection and for Power Query–based workloads like Dataflow Gen2, but not for all consumers.

Dataflow Gen2 works because it runs through Power Query and explicitly applies the role when creating queries. The Snowflake Database item, on the other hand, isn’t Power Query–based. It uses an internal metadata/sync engine and opens a session before any queries exist, so there’s nowhere to inject the role.

As a result, the Snowflake Database item falls back to its default session behaviour, which Snowflake effectively treats as PUBLIC. If PUBLIC isn’t granted, the login fails — even though a role is specified on the connection. In short, the Snowflake Database item currently ignores the connection‑level role setting, which is a product limitation rather than a user misconfiguration.