The Scenario
You joined the data engineering team at a fintech company three weeks ago. On your first day, someone handed you access to Snowflake and said "the schema documentation is in a Confluence page from 2023." The Confluence page has 40 tables listed. Snowflake has 300.
Your manager wants a complete data dictionary by end of week — every database, every schema, every table you have access to, with row counts, byte sizes, owners, and creation dates. It's supposed to anchor a data governance initiative. And nobody told you that building it manually means running SHOW TABLES dozens of times and copying outputs into an Excel worksheet one schema at a time.
The bad version:
- Run SHOW DATABASES in SnowSight, copy the result, paste into Excel
- For each database, run SHOW SCHEMAS, repeat the copy-paste
- For each schema, run SHOW TABLES, paste into the accumulating worksheet — and discover the column order shifted between schemas so the whole thing is misaligned
You've spent four hours and you have a worksheet that still needs to be normalized before anyone will look at it.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, connects to Snowflake through its built-in integration, and can traverse your entire account hierarchy — databases, schemas, tables — and write a structured inventory into the worksheet in one pass.
Open a blank Excel worksheet and paste this into the SheetXAI sidebar:
Show me all tables in Snowflake schema ANALYTICS.PUBLIC that have more than 50,000 rows, and write table_name, row_count, size_bytes, and retention_time into this Excel sheet sorted by row_count descending
What You Get
- One row per qualifying table in ANALYTICS.PUBLIC
- Columns: table_name, row_count, size_bytes, retention_time
- Sorted by row_count descending, no cleanup needed
- If a table is inaccessible due to role permissions, SheetXAI notes it rather than dropping it silently
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You need the full account catalog, not just one schema
List all Snowflake databases I have access to, then for each database list all schemas, and for each schema list all tables with row_count, size_bytes, owner, and created_date — write one row per table into this Excel sheet with those column headers
You want to flag stale or empty tables alongside the inventory
List all tables in Snowflake databases ANALYTICS and PROD_DW, write table_name, schema, database, row_count, size_bytes, and created_date into this Excel sheet, then add a column called stale that marks YES for any table with row_count = 0 or created_date more than 180 days ago
Limit to a specific database with an owner filter
For Snowflake database PROD_DW, list all schemas and all tables owned by the role TRANSFORMER, write database, schema, table_name, row_count, size_bytes, and owner into this Excel sheet sorted by size_bytes descending
Full catalog with a summary row at the bottom
List all Snowflake databases and schemas I have access to, for each schema list all tables with row_count, size_bytes, owner, and created_date — write one row per table into this Excel sheet, then add a summary row at the bottom with total table count, total size_bytes, and count of tables where row_count = 0
The pattern: summarization, filtering, and flagging live in the same prompt as the enumeration — not in a second pass after you've exported the raw data.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a blank Excel workbook, then ask it to build a structured Snowflake inventory across every database and schema you have access to. Also see export a schema table inventory for a targeted version, or return to the Snowflake integration overview.