Posts

All the latest Snowflake learnings, live and direct from experienced Snowflake practitioners.

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Snowflake Roles 101: Comprehensive Guide to Access Control

Jovan Saković of Tasman Analytics provides an overview of key concepts in Snowflake access control and explains the different types of roles. Whether you're a Snowflake administrator or data engineer looking to better understand access control, this post is for you.

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Snowflake Cost Optimization: 15 proven strategies for reducing costs

Snowflake is an incredibly powerful platform, easily scaling to handle ever-larger data volumes without compromising on performance. But, if not controlled, costs associated with this scaling quickly climb. Whether your goal is to reduce the price of an upcoming renewal, extend your existing contract's runway, or reduce on-demand costs, use the strategies in this post to make significant savings.

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Terraform for Streamlined Snowflake Management (2024)

Gary James shares practical lessons and guidance on when and how to use Terraform for managing Snowflake infrastructure based on many years of experience. He includes practical examples, cases where you shouldn't use Terraform, and other important considerations.

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Snowflake 101: Working with Semi-Structured Data

In this post, Tomas explains how to work with semi-structured data in Snowflake. First, we cover the different types of semi-structured data. Then, we cover how to load it into Snowflake and all the different ways to create your tables.

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Snowflake Batch Data Loading | Best Practices in 2024

In this post, we cover the most important techniques and best practices for efficiently loading data into Snowflake, with an emphasis on optimizing for cost efficiency and performance.

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The definitive guide to using Snowflake Tasks

A deep dive into all things Snowflake Tasks. Tomas covers setting up Tasks with dependencies, choosing a compute model and operational considerations when managing Tasks.

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Identifying unused tables in Snowflake

Removing unused tables in your Snowflake account can reduce spend, increase security and improve overall warehouse usability. In this post, we show how to identify tables that have not been accessed recently.

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How to use Query Timeouts in Snowflake

Query timeouts are an important tool for Snowflake users looking to control costs and prevent accidental cost spikes. In this post we’ll cover why they’re useful and how they can be configured.

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Should you use CTEs in Snowflake?

CTEs are an extremely valuable tool for modularizing and reusing SQL logic. They're also a frequent focus of optimization discussions, as their usage has been associated with unexpected and sometimes inefficient query execution. In this post, we dig into the impact of CTEs on query plans, understand when they are safe to use, and when they may be best avoided.

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Snowflake query tags for enhanced monitoring

Snowflake query tags allow users to associate arbitrary metadata with each query. In this post, we show how you can use query tags to achieve better visibility & monitoring for your Snowflake query costs and performance.

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3 ways to configure Snowflake warehouse sizes in dbt

The ability to use different warehouse sizes for different workloads in Snowflake provides enormous value for performance and cost optimization. dbt natively integrates with Snowflake to allow specific warehouses to be chosen down to the model level. In this post, we explain exactly how to use this feature and share some best practices.

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How to use the Snowflake Query Profile

The Snowflake Query Profile is the single best resource you have to understand how Snowflake is executing your query and learn how to improve it. In this post we cover important topics like how to interpret the Query Profile and the things you should look for when diagnosing poor query performance.

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Choosing the right warehouse size in Snowflake

Snowflake users enjoy a lot of flexibility when it comes to compute configuration. In this post we cover the implications of virtual warehouse sizing on query speeds, and share some techniques to determine the right one.

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3 Ways to Achieve Effective Clustering in Snowflake

Pairing query design with effective clustering can dramatically improve pruning and query speeds. We'll explore how and when you should leverage this powerful Snowflake feature, and the three ways you can effectively cluster your tables.

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Micro-Partitions: Understanding Snowflake's File Structure

Independently scalable compute and storage is an architecture fundamental of Snowflake. In this post, we’ll be focusing on how Snowflake stores data, and how it can greatly accelerate query performance.

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60x faster database clones in Snowflake

Snowflake's zero-copy cloning feature is extremely powerful for quickly creating production replica environments. But, anyone who has cloned a database or schema with a large number of tables has experienced that it can take over ten minutes to complete. In this post we explore a potential solution.

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Calculating cost per query in Snowflake

Understanding the cost of each query in your Snowflake virtual warehouses is critical for cost management. This post provides a detailed overview and working code to help you calculate cost per query.

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