Snowflake Performance Tuning and Cost Optimization
- Date
- Ian Whitestone
On September 28, I gave a presentation to the Snowflake Toronto User Group on Snowflake performance tuning and cost optimization. The following content was covered:
- Snowflake architecture
- The lifecycle of a Snowflake query
- Snowflake's billing model
- A simple framework for cost optimization, along with a detailed methodology for how to calculate cost per query
- Warehouse configuration best practices
- Table clustering tips
Updated presentation available!
An updated version of this presentation was given at Data Council Austin in April 2023 - check it out here!
Slides
The slides can be viewed here. To navigate the slides, you can click the arrows on the bottom right, or use the arrow keys on your keyboard. Press either the "esc" or the "o" key to zoom out into an "overview" mode where you can see all slides. From there, you can again navigate using the arrows and either click a slide or press "esc"/"o" to focus on it.

Presentation Recording
A recording of the presentation is available on youtube. The presentation starts at 3:29.
If you would like, I am more than happy to come in and give this presentation (or a variation of it) to your team where they can have the opportunity to ask questions. Send an email to [email protected] if you would like to set that up.