Snowflake by nature is “optimized”, it stores the data granularly via micro-partitions, organized in columnar fashion. This enables fine-grained partition pruning and effective scanning of individual columns (only the columns referenced by a query are scanned). Snowflake also takes care of compression and statistics collection which are performed automatically as…

On large, global enterprises collecting, processing and providing data to and from multiple locations across the world, it is common to have location-specific data access restriction. In this article we are going to use that as an example to show how we can implement Dynamic Data Masking and Object-Tagging to…

Let's face it, we make mistakes. Sometimes, even when we're just trying to fix a minor issue, we end up escalating it to an even greater ordeal. Like when we thought we've updated a small chuck of a table and later realised that we missed defining a WHERE clause. Or…

Requirements Snowflake Enterprise edition and up. CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW privilege on the Schema where the MV will be created. SELECT privilege on the MV’s source table. SELECT privilege on the MV itself (Only if you will directly query the MV) Snowflake Dynamic Optimization Before we get into the Materialized View, it is important to…

The Query Acceleration Service (QAS) is now generally available to all Snowflake Accounts — Enterprise edition and up. It is a feature that allows Snowflake virtual warehouses to have essentially boundless amount of resources as it needs to accelerate parts of queries. What is Query Acceleration Service? It’s a common situation where a virtual warehouse…

Before we dive into the steps of query optimization, it is important to ask ourselves this question: Why do I need to tune queries? What am I looking to get at the end of it? …

I’m using EXPLAIN in my day to day life as a Snowflake Administrator. It is a simple and straightforward feature which makes it easy to be neglected. Today I’m hoping to uncover other benefits of using it and share how it’s helping me day by day. If you’re not familiar…

Early this year (2022), Snowflake announced a new addition to the Advanced Series of their Certification, the SnowPro Advanced: Administrator! The Beta version was up for the whole of March and the refined final version will be released on June! I was looking forward to this as it is relevant…

Snowflake supports swapping two tables using the ALTER TABLE … SWAP WITH command. It is however very easy to make assumptions that are completely different from what it actually does. In this article, we are going to take a closer look into this command and uncover possible issues that may…