Configure AtScale as a universal semantic layer over Snowflake using the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) standard to expose governed metrics to Power BI and AI agents
Connect AtScale to your Snowflake account by providing warehouse connection credentials and selecting the schemas that contain your fact and dimension tables
Use AtScale's modeling interface or AI-assisted One-Click Modeling to generate an initial semantic model including measures, dimensions, hierarchies, and join relationships from the Snowflake schema
Publish the semantic model and obtain the AtScale XMLA endpoint URL, which allows Power BI Desktop and Excel to connect as if connecting to an Analysis Services model
For AI agent access, use AtScale's REST or SQL API to expose named metrics and dimensions; the OSI standard ensures metric definitions remain portable and can be synchronized with Snowflake Semantic Views or other OSI-compatible tools
Apply AtScale role-based access controls to restrict metric visibility and row-level data access per team, independent of underlying Snowflake role assignments
Known gotchas
AtScale sits as a translation and caching layer above Snowflake; query performance depends on AtScale's internal aggregation cache being warm — cold cache queries pass through to Snowflake and may be slower than direct Snowflake queries until the cache is populated
The XMLA endpoint provided by AtScale is compatible with Excel and Power BI but is not identical to a native Analysis Services XMLA endpoint; some advanced XMLA features (e.g., certain partition management commands) may not be supported
OSI portability between AtScale and Snowflake Semantic Views is an emerging standard (formalized in 2025); verify specific feature parity between the two platforms before relying on bidirectional semantic model synchronization in production
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