Topic 2 - Snowflake Cost Management Flashcards
(25 cards)
What is ACCOUNT_USAGE in Snowflake?
A schema within the SNOWFLAKE database that provides comprehensive historical data and usage metrics for your account. It is primarily used for account monitoring and cost analysis.
What is Active storage?
The storage used by tables and other database objects that are actively accessible and queried.
What is Auto resume?
A feature for virtual warehouses that automatically restarts the warehouse when new queries are submitted.
What is Auto suspend?
A feature for virtual warehouses that automatically suspends (turns off) the warehouse after a specified period of inactivity.
What is Capacity (storage pricing)?
A storage pricing model where you pre-pay for a certain amount of storage, typically resulting in a lower per-terabyte cost compared to on-demand.
What are Cloud Services in Snowflake?
Operations in Snowflake (like creating objects, cache lookups) that consume compute resources but are not directly tied to virtual warehouse usage; they are billed separately if they exceed a certain percentage of virtual warehouse usage.
What is Control in the cost management framework?
The component focused on monitoring and limiting costs through mechanisms like resource monitors and virtual warehouse configurations.
What is a Cost centre?
A department or unit within an organization to which costs are attributed.
What is a Credit quota?
The limit on the number of credits a resource monitor grants to associated virtual warehouses during a specific cycle.
What is Data transfer in Snowflake?
The cost associated with moving data, such as during database replication or unloading data to external stages in different regions or cloud providers.
What is Fail-safe storage?
Storage used by Snowflake internally for disaster recovery and historical data, independent of Time Travel.
What is INFORMATION_SCHEMA?
A schema available in every database that provides metadata about database objects and limited historical usage data. It is useful for quick queries and object exploration.
What are Internal stages?
Storage locations managed by Snowflake for temporarily storing data files before loading or after unloading.
What is Multi-cluster auto-scaling?
A feature for virtual warehouses that allows Snowflake to dynamically add and remove clusters to handle varying workloads and high concurrency.
What is On-demand (storage pricing)?
A storage pricing model where you are billed monthly based on the average daily amount of data stored.
What is Optimization in the cost management framework?
The component focused on identifying opportunities to improve efficiency and reduce costs, often by analyzing usage data and adjusting configurations.
What is Query profile?
A tool in Snowflake that provides detailed information about the execution of a specific query, helpful for identifying performance bottlenecks and optimization opportunities.
What is a Resource monitor?
A Snowflake object used to track virtual warehouse credit consumption and trigger actions (like notifications or suspension) when defined thresholds are reached.
What is Role-based Access Control (RBAC)?
A security framework that allows administrators to control access to objects and operations based on the roles assigned to users. It can be used to restrict who can modify cost-related configurations.
What are Serverless features in Snowflake?
Features (like database replication, materialized view refreshes) that do not require explicit virtual warehouses to run, with compute costs billed per second per core.
What is Spilling?
The process where a query requires more memory than available on the virtual warehouse node and writes data to local or remote storage, often indicating inefficient query execution or an undersized warehouse.
What is Tagging in Snowflake?
Attaching key-value pairs to Snowflake objects (like warehouses, databases, schemas) to categorize them, often used to attribute costs to specific cost centres.
What is Time Travel storage?
The storage required to retain historical data for a specified period, allowing access to previous versions of tables.
What is Visibility in the cost management framework?
The component focused on understanding and attributing costs, often through monitoring tools and usage data.
