Salesforce Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) and Snowflake can share data in both directions without copying it. Zero-copy data federation lets Data 360 use tables that stay in Snowflake, so warehouse data such as orders or product usage can enrich customer profiles, segments and AI agents. Zero-copy data sharing goes the other way, exposing Data 360 data to Snowflake for analytics and data science. Salesforce and Snowflake made the bidirectional integration generally available, and it gives teams a way to connect CRM and warehouse data without building and maintaining pipelines.
Which direction do you need?
| Direction | Called | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| Snowflake to Salesforce | Zero-copy data federation | Bring order history, product usage, billing or loyalty data into Data 360 for unified profiles, segments, calculated insights and agents |
| Salesforce to Snowflake | Zero-copy data sharing | Analyze CRM, engagement and unified profile data alongside warehouse data in Snowflake, for BI and data science |
Salesforce's zero-copy federation also works with other platforms, including Google BigQuery, Databricks and Amazon Redshift, so the same pattern applies if your warehouse is not Snowflake.
What are good first use cases?
- Service agents and AI agents seeing recent orders, shipments or usage from the warehouse on the customer record, without nightly copies.
- Marketing segments built on purchase or product-usage data that only exists in Snowflake.
- Account health or churn signals calculated from usage data and surfaced to customer success in Salesforce.
- Revenue and pipeline analysis in Snowflake that joins CRM opportunities with finance data.
What should you plan for?
- Identity: decide how warehouse records match Salesforce accounts and contacts, such as by customer ID or email, before building segments.
- Data model: map Snowflake tables to Data 360 data model objects deliberately, starting with the few that drive your use case.
- Performance: federated queries run against Snowflake; for frequently used data, Salesforce offers acceleration, which caches a copy in Data 360, so test response times for agent and console use.
- Cost: both platforms meter usage. Data 360 consumes credits and Snowflake bills compute for queries, so estimate both for your query patterns.
- Governance: apply access controls in both systems and agree which team owns each shared dataset.
How do you start?
- Pick one use case with a clear owner and metric, such as reducing service handle time with order data.
- List the Snowflake tables it needs and the Salesforce objects they relate to.
- Set up the connection, federate only those tables and build identity rules.
- Test with real users and real volumes, then expand table by table.
