Snowflake Best Practices

Warehouse Design

Sizing (CRITICAL)

• Start small (XS or S), scale up as needed
• Enable auto-scaling for concurrency
• Enable auto-suspend (1 minute idle)
• Separate warehouses for different workloads

Multi-Cluster Warehouses

• Use for high concurrency (many users)
• Set min/max clusters based on load
• Scaling policy: Standard (default) or Economy

Query Optimization

Clustering Keys (CRITICAL)

• Define clustering keys for frequently filtered columns
• Improves micro-partition pruning
• Monitor clustering depth
• Automatic clustering: ALTER TABLE ... CLUSTER BY (...)

Result Caching

• 24-hour cache for identical queries
• Use SHOW PARAMETERS to check cache status
• Bypass cache with query hint: /*+ NO_RESULT_CACHE */

Materialized Views

• For repeated aggregations
• Automatically refreshed on base table changes
• Cost: storage + refresh compute

Data Loading

COPY INTO (CRITICAL)

• Batch load from stages (S3/GCS/Azure)
• File size: 100-250MB compressed (optimal)
• Use pattern matching for multiple files

Snowpipe

• Continuous ingestion
• Event-driven (S3 notifications)
• Serverless compute

Cost Optimization

Resource Monitors

• Set credit quotas per warehouse
• Alerts and suspend actions
• Track consumption with WAREHOUSE_METERING_HISTORY

Storage

• Use zero-copy cloning for dev/test
• Time travel retention: 1 day (standard), 90 days (enterprise)
• Fail-safe: 7 days (not configurable)

References

• Snowflake Best Practices