Stages
Before data can make its way into tables, it must be loaded into Snowflake using a stage. Stages are logical objects that abstract cloud filesystems so they can be used in a standard manner to load data into Snowflake. There are two types of stages that can be defined: external and internal. External stages can be created on top of a cloud location (for the supported cloud storage services) outside Snowflake and are used to load data from external source systems. Internal stages are created within the Snowflake account and therefore use the storage type of the hosting provider. Internal stages are used to stage files that originate from within the Snowflake account and can not be used to load external data.
Supported cloud storage services for external stages are as follows:
- Amazon S3 buckets
- Google Cloud Storage buckets
- Microsoft Azure containers
The following figure shows the layout of external stages in relation to internal stage types.