Snowflake Cortex MCP Server

Snowflake Cortex AI Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server

The Snowflake Cortex MCP server bridges the powerful analytics and semantic search capabilities of Snowflake Cortex with AI assistants that speak the Model Context Protocol. By running as a lightweight sidecar, it exposes a set of high‑level tools—Cortex Search, Cortex Analyst, and Cortex Agent—to MCP clients such as Claude for Desktop, fast‑agent, or the Agentic Orchestration Framework. This integration lets developers harness Snowflake’s structured and unstructured data directly from an AI workflow without writing custom SQL or REST calls.

The server solves a common pain point for data‑centric AI projects: coupling the AI assistant to a database backend. Traditionally, developers must write adapters that translate natural language into SQL or search queries, manage authentication, and stream results back to the assistant. The Cortex MCP server abstracts all of that complexity behind a single protocol interface. Once connected, the assistant can invoke semantic search over massive datasets, generate SQL from plain text, or orchestrate multi‑step queries across both structured tables and unstructured document stores—all with a single tool call.

Key capabilities are delivered through declarative tool definitions. A developer can declare a tool with search index details, or a tool that points to a semantic model view. The Payload Builder utility further automates this process by allowing queries to be translated into fully‑formed MCP payloads at runtime. This eliminates hardcoded tool configurations, making the system highly maintainable and adaptable to evolving data schemas or new Cortex services. The server also supports streaming responses via Server‑Sent Events, enabling real‑time feedback in the assistant’s UI.

Typical use cases include building retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) applications that pull contextual information from Snowflake tables, creating conversational analytics dashboards where users ask questions in natural language and receive instant SQL‑driven insights, or orchestrating complex agent workflows that blend structured queries with unstructured document retrieval. Because the MCP server communicates over stdio or sockets rather than HTTP, it integrates seamlessly into local development environments and IDE extensions without exposing a public API surface.

What sets the Snowflake Cortex MCP server apart is its tight coupling with Snowflake’s native security and authentication mechanisms. By leveraging programmatic access tokens and the official REST API, it ensures that all data access remains governed by Snowflake’s role‑based controls. Additionally, the server’s modular tool architecture allows teams to plug in new Cortex features or custom extensions without touching the core protocol logic, giving developers a future‑proof foundation for AI‑driven data exploration.