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Snowflake Zero-Copy Clone: Fastest, Cheapest And Most Accurate Development Solution

Clark Perucho
4 min readAug 1, 2021

Photo by Hello I’m Nik

Zero-Copy Clone, such a trivial term. because how do you clone something for nothing? Let’s find out.

Clone is one of the many incredible features that are unique to Snowflake. It enables us to create a copy of a data object in the most efficient way.

Before we get into it, let us have a quick look of Clone-able data objects:

  • DATABASE
  • SCHEMA
  • TABLE
  • STREAMS

Other schema objects:

  • STAGE
  • FILE FORMAT
  • SEQUENCE
  • TASK
  • PIPES

For the full and up to date list of supported objects, please visit the Snowflake official documentation page here.

How Zero-Copy Clone Works

Unlike other data warehouse systems, copying a data object in Snowflake using clone does not replicate the physical copy of the data. This results in an extremely fast operation regardless of the size of the object to…

Clark Perucho
Clark Perucho

Written by Clark Perucho

Snowflake Data Superhero | Certified SnowPro: Administrator | Teradata 14 Certified Technical Specialist

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