Introduction
FME supports reading and writing geospatial data to Snowflake using the Snowflake Spatial Reader and Writer. Currently, the geography data type supports points, lines, and polygons. The data can be stored in WKB, WKT, and GeoJSON. Learn more about the geography data type through Snowflake’s documentation.
Read more about how to use FME and the Snowflake Database format.
Snowflake Coordinate System
The geography data type is stored in the WGS 84 coordinate system, also known as EPSG 4326. So that’s easy enough for FME to take any of your geospatial data and transform it into this coordinate system. When stored in this coordinate system in Snowflake, you can make use of the built-in geospatial functions of the database.
Reading Geospatial Data
As you know, FME makes it pretty easy to get data out of a database. No exception here. Simply create a database connection and select the geospatial tables you want to read into FME. Refer to our documentation to learn more about the Snowflake Spatial Reader.
As of FME 2025.2, the Coordinate System parameter is now configured within the Parameters dialog of each reader/writer format. For more information, including details about the change and affected transformers, please see Coordinate System Parameter Location Change.
Writing Geospatial Data
Much like reading from a database, FME makes it just as easy to write your data into the Snowflake database. Refer to our documentation to learn more about the Snowflake Spatial Writer.
When working with geospatial data, ensure you store the data in a coordinate system that is consistent across your features. In this case, for Snowflake Database, that will be the Geography Coordinate system WGS 84. So, ensure when writing geospatial data to Snowflake that the coordinate system is set on the Writer to LL-WGS84. Here’s a video that shows writing geospatial data to the Snowflake Database.
Video
Interacting with Snowflake's Geospatial Functions
As we can all appreciate, the Snowflake Database is designed for large amounts of data. You may want to brush up on ways to interact with this data within the database. What I’m getting at here is the recommendation of “Let the Database do the work”. Instead of pulling all the data into FME and running geospatial functions on the data within FME, always consider what you might be able to do with the innate geospatial functions of the database. If you know you will be working with the Snowflake Database and Geospatial Data, why not familiarize yourself with what’s supported? Check out the Snowflake Documentation.
Inside FME, you can access the Snowflake Geospatial Functions in a variety of ways. Using the SQLCreator and the SQLExecutor, you can set the Reader parameter, the Where Clause, or use the FeatureReader, which also allows you to set up a Where Clause to utilize a geospatial function. See some examples below.
SQLCreator or SQLExecutor
And yes… this will return the geometry of the feature if it exists.
Reader Where Clause
The Where Clause parameter on the Reader can be made into a Published Parameter. This makes it more useful and allows a user to enter the latitude, longitude, and buffer distance as seen in this example below.
Here, I have made use of the other published parameters that will prompt the user for information and used this to build the Where Clause (jdbc_where_clause) and made it private, so it isn’t prompting the user at runtime.
FeatureReader Where Clause
Here’s what the FeatureReader might look like. In this example, I have 3 published parameters, looking for the longitude, latitude, and distance to buffer in metres. This allows me to build the where clause that I feed into the FeatureReader. The cool part of this is that it will apply to all the features of the FeatureReader.
The AttributeCreator ends up looking something like this:
And I pass the where clause (MyWhere) into the FeatureReader.