Recently I was having strange issues while trying to grant a role access to a database schema in snowflake.

The schema was manually created after a migration from another database, and its name was in lower-case – e.g. MYDATABASE.”dbo”, “dbo” being the schema name.

Auto Upper Case + Schema Case Sensitivity

What I realized after a short while was that all SQL identifiers you place into Snowflake SQL are automatically made upper case.  Snowflake cares about schema case sensitivity though.

So, unless you’ve been going around and adding double-quotes around all your database/schema/table names while creating them, almost everything you have will be in upper case.

When you do create things in lower-case manually with quoting, you have to go around adding quotes to them in every query to ensure they are actually given in lower-case to the database.  For example, SELECT * FROM mydatabase.dbo.mytable will implicitly become SELECT * FROM MYDATABASE.DBO.MYTABLE.  So, if “dbo” is the real name and not “DBO” for the schema, you actually need to do SELECT * FROM MYDATABASE.”dbo”.MYTABLE instead.

Note, this assumes MYDATABASE and MYTABLE were created in upper-case or without quoting.

Final Thoughts

I personally feel that you should avoid quoting and let everything be upper case.  If you did have to create things in lower-case, then I suggest always using quoting everywhere.  Anything in between the two will get confusing.