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 Security for Data Lake User Provisioning.
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).
Register API Client for Data Lake (Token Exchange Grant).
Set Up Security for Data Lake Admin Console.
Add Tables and Columns to Data Lake.
Configure Data Lake Access Roles.

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

External System	Setup Instructions
Snowflake	Set up the Workday Data Cloud Zerocopy Connector
Google Cloud	Set up cross-cloud connection for Workday Data Lake
Salesforce	See instructions for the Workday Data Connect connector available in Data 360 Connectors and Integrations.
Databricks	Available in Early Access. Contact your Workday Account Executive for more information on enabling the connector. For setup instructions, see the Databricks Documentation.
AWS	Lake Formation: Federate to Workday Data Connect Sagemaker: Connecting to Workday Data Connect

You may need the following information to configure Data Lake in your data platform:

Information	Details
Token Endpoint	https://{HOST}/ccx/oauth2/{TENANT}/token
Polaris Catalog URL	Implementation: https://impl-catalog.{data-center-code}.myworkday.com Production: https://catalog.{data-center-code}.myworkday.com Where {data-center-code} is your Workday environment prefix, such as wd00 .
Polaris Catalog/Warehouse Name	workday
Principal Role	all-reads-role
Realm	{TENANT}
Private key file associated with API Client (JWT Bearer Flow)	{private-key}.pem RSA 2048 PEM format associated with the API Client you configured in your Workday tenant

After you establish 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.