Environments

An environment is a container within your organization for the two building blocks of a governed data experience:

• Packages — versioned semantic models, plus the reports, dashboards, and data apps built on them.
• Connections — secure, managed links to the databases and warehouses those packages read from.

Environments are stable, governed resource configurations. They change deliberately — through modeling and publishing — and are the foundation your team analyzes against, not where analysis happens. Analysis happens in workspaces, which consume the models an environment publishes.

Where an Environment Fits

Organization
├── Environment: analytics
│   ├── Connections          → secure links to your databases
│   │   └── warehouse (→ snowflake.com)
│   └── Packages             → published semantic models + apps
│       └── sales-model
│           ├── v1.2.3       (versions)
│           └── v1.2.4 (latest)
└── Workspaces               → where analysis happens
    └── consume published packages

Two properties do most of the work:

• Connections are shared. Configure a data source once and every package in the environment can use it. Credible indexes each connection's schema so AI agents can discover tables and suggest models. See Connect a Database.
• Packages are versioned. Every publish creates a new immutable version. Pin one as latest, or publish unpinned to test before promoting. See Publishing.

Common Patterns

Teams typically organize environments around a department (finance, HR, RevOps — each owning its own data and models), around delivery stages (dev, staging, production, plus private per-developer sandboxes), or a hybrid of the two. See Best Practices for these patterns in detail.

Your Credentials Stay Secure

An admin stores database credentials in the environment once; no one needs to handle them again:

• No local credentials. Developers and modelers SSO into Credible and use the environment's managed connections — nothing is stored on their machines.
• All access is proxied. Every request to the underlying data — from an IDE, the in-app agent, a workspace, or an API — goes through Credible, never directly to your database.
• Access-controlled and audit-logged. Every request is checked against the environment's ACLs and recorded in an audit log.

This makes Credible a secure perimeter around your data — grant analysts, partners, or applications governed access to your models without ever exposing a credential.

Environment Roles

Grant access to an environment with one of three roles, assigned to users or groups. A role applies to every package in the environment; you can also grant narrower access on an individual package.

For the full permission model — organization roles, groups, and package-level sharing — see Users & Groups and Permissions.

Environments vs. Workspaces

Next Steps

First connect your data, then pick how you want to build: