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Optimizing Snowflake

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Intermediate content levelIntermediate

Fixing performance bottlenecks and reducing costs

Course outcomes

  • Understand common performance issues in Snowflake and how to solve them
  • Fine-tune SQL queries to achieve the best possible performance
  • Ingest data into Snowflake effectively
  • Use the query plan and query profile to induce better performance
  • Use table clustering and partition pruning effectively
  • Create virtual warehouses that will be fine-tuned for performance and cost optimization

Course description

Snowflake is a cloud-based data platform with support for a diverse range of workloads, including data engineering and ML pipelines, modern data apps, and LLM and GenAI for data-related projects. But even after achieving a firm grasp of fundamental concepts and basic architecture, Snowflake users may need optimization strategies when data growth leads to slowed down queries or ballooning storage and service charges.

Join expert Tomas Sobotik to better understand Snowflake’s core functionality, configuration parameters, and typical performance bottlenecks. You’ll learn how to identify and solve common performance problems like spilling, out of memory issues, and exploding joins; how to use the Snowflake optimizer to run more effective queries; and how to employ a variety of optimization methods from clustering and partition pruning to effective data loading. You’ll also discover how to create virtual warehouses, which can be fine-tuned to improve overall performance on the platform and reduce costs.

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

  • Optimize performance and costs in Snowflake
  • Load data efficiently
  • Configure virtual warehouses
  • Understand the query lifecycle
  • Table clustering and micro partition pruning

This live event is for you because...

  • You’re a data engineer or data architect who wants to achieve faster performance or reduce costs in Snowflake.
  • You work with Snowflake and want to be more effective when working with the platform.
  • You work with Snowflake and want to understand how the platform works under the hood.

Prerequisites

  • Sign up for a Snowflake trial account, enterprise edition, and select AWS as a cloud provider
  • Knowledge of SQL and relational databases
  • Fundamental knowledge of the Snowflake platform

Recommended follow-up:

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Snowflake billing model (15 minutes)

  • Presentation: How Snowflake billing works
  • Q&A

Virtual warehouse configuration (15 minutes)

  • Presentation: Configuring virtual warehouses cost-effectively
  • Hands-on exercise: Create virtual warehouse with proper parameters settings
  • Q&A

Query lifecycle (15 minutes)

  • Presentation: How Snowflake runs queries and how it relates to performance and cost
  • Q&A

Query plan (15 minutes)

  • Presentation: What a query plan offers and how to use it
  • Q&A

Performance optimization overview (15 minutes)

  • Presentation: Strategies for optimizing a performance
  • Q&A
  • Break

Query performance issues (20 minutes)

  • Presentation: Common performance issues and how to solve them
  • Q&A

Table scans and partition pruning (20 minutes)

  • Presentation: Partition pruning optimization
  • Hands-on exercise: Try different queries to verify the pruning performance
  • Q&A

Table clustering (20 minutes)

  • Presentation: How table clustering works and how to use it
  • Hands-on exercise: Verify how well the tables are clustered
  • Q&A
  • Break

Data loading (15 minutes)

  • Presentation: Loading data efficiently
  • Q&A

Improving your queries (20 minutes)

  • Presentation: Improving certain queries like CTEs, merges, and joins
  • Hands-on exercise: Implement suggested query improvements
  • Q&A

Your Instructor

  • Tomáš Sobotík

    Tomas Sobotik is a senior data engineer and Snowflake subject matter expert at Norlys. He’s also a Snowflake Data Superhero and certified Snowflake expert. A technology enthusiast and passionate data developer, he has over 15 years of experience working on BI and data-related projects spanning various industries.

Skill covered

Snowflake