Administration

Significant effort was made to make the day 2 operations of Workbench easy for administrators.

Automated Releases

Snowflake enables Native Applications to be auto-upgraded as detailed in the Snowflake Native App Auto upgrades documentation. The Workbench Native App is updated regularly by Posit and is pushed to customers ensuring all accounts are using the latest Workbench stable release. These updates will include: newer Workbench releases, additional system, Python, and R packages to the base environment, and improvements in the Native App experience. Release notes are included with every release. We understand the trust that customers are giving us and are open to feedback on this process. Snowflake enforces a security scan on releases.

Updating your Posit Licence

Updating your Posit License can be done with the Snowsight UI and requires ACCOUNTADMIN permissions.

Navigate to the Native App Connections page

Click the trashcan icon for Posit Workbench License and then Revoke.

To add the new license, follow the steps documented under the heading Activate the native app in the Installation documentation. The Workbench Native App will restart and become available in 2-3 minutes.

Backup Workbench

Backing up and restoring the Workbench Native App can be done using the Administer Workbench Streamlit application and stored procedures.

This example demonstrates how to backup and restore using the Streamlit Application. In general, backups of Workbench a rarely required. The data and scripts should be your main targets for backups, and the Workbench app itself is easily replaced. All administrative operations which need backup and restore are encapsulated within the stored procedures themselves.

Visit Administer Workbench and click the backup tab in the sidebar. Next, name for your backup and click Create Backup. Your data is backed up as soon as this action completes.

Your backup is created and enters the INITIALIZED state. Referring to the native app architecture diagram, note that we are using block storage for the user’s /home directory. The initial backup for the block volume should take 3-4 minutes, with successive backups being faster. Note that your data is backed up the instant a backup is created and in the INITIALIZED state.

Wait for the snapshot to enter the CREATED state.

Restore Workbench from Backup

In order to restore the Workbench Native App, ensure that you have already created a backup. To restore from a given backup, select the given backup to use and click Restore from Backup. It should take 5 minutes for the Workbench Native App service to restart with the desired snapshot.