Delta Lake UniForm to Snowflake: Cross-Platform Table Access Without a Second Copy

Making a Databricks-owned Delta table queryable from Snowflake without copying it is one of those things where every individual piece — Delta Lake UniForm, Unity Catalog, private connectivity — is documented somewhere on its own, but nobody writes up how they actually fit together end to end. If you've been asked to give Snowflake read access to a dataset that Databricks owns, without standing up a nightly export job, this is for you.

Why the Two Platforms Don't Share Data Natively

Delta Lake and Apache Iceberg are both open table formats, but they track a table's files, schema, and change history differently. Delta Lake is Databricks' native format. Snowflake has strong native support for Iceberg. A table written as Delta Lake isn't something Snowflake can open directly, and a table written as Iceberg by some other engine isn't something Databricks reads as Delta.