Get Started with Workday Data Lake

Workday Data Lake (or “Data Lake”) stores Workday data as Iceberg tables. External platforms connect to Data Lake’s Iceberg tables through zero-copy connectors (referred to as Workday Data Connect in partner documentation), reading data where it lives rather than exporting or replicating it in the partner platform. This ensures that your data:

Remains within Workday's security boundary until requested.
Has a single source of truth, reducing duplication and improving consistency across different platforms and applications.

Data Lake is best suited for large-scale enterprise analytics and data warehousing use cases where periodic data refresh is acceptable, serving as an alternative to traditional ETL pipelines.

Before you can connect to Data Lake from an external system, you need to complete these steps:

Set Up the Data Cloud Functional Area
Set Up Integration System Users for Data Lake
Register API Clients. Depending on the connector options in the data platform, either:
Register API Client for Data Lake (JWT Bearer Grant)
Register API Client for Data Lake (Refresh Token Grant)
Set Up Security for Data Lake Admin Console
Add Tables and Columns to Data Lake
Configure Data Lake Access Roles

After you have completed the setup in Workday, you can connect to Data Lake from these external systems:

Snowflake:
Contact your Snowflake Account Executive for a connectivity guide from Snowflake to Workday Data Lake
Google Cloud:
Contact your Google Cloud Account Executive for a connectivity guide from Google Cloud to Workday Data Lake. Alternatively, you can email them at biglake-help@google.com.
Salesforce:
Follow the instructions for the
Workday Data Connect
connector available in Data 360 Connectors and Integrations.

After you’ve established a data connection from the external client, you can query Workday data. See Query Workday Data Lake.

Only certain Workday business objects are available in Data Cloud. See Data Cloud Catalog.