Section 1.1 - SnowPro Core Certification Study Guide

This series is intended to be a personal study guide. Information may not be comprehensive or accurate. I am sharing it in case others find it useful. Please feel free to comment if any information is inaccurate.

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1.1 Explain how to manage Snowflake accounts

Managing Your Snowflake Account

• Account usage

  • ACCOUNT_USAGE and READER_ACCOUNT_USAGE schemas provide object metadata and historical usage data about the account and all reader accounts associated with it
  • ACCOUNT_USAGE
    • In general, these mirror corresponding views/functions in the information schema, with the following differences:
    • AU shows dropped objects, IS does not
    • AU has a latency of 45 min to 3 hrs, IS has no latency
    • AU retains historical usage for 1 year, IS for 7 days to 6 months
    • Account Usage views
  • READER_ACCOUNT_USAGE views (estimated latency)
    • LOGIN_HISTORY (2 hrs)
    • QUERY_HISTORY (45 min)
    • RESOURCE_MONITORS (2 hrs)
    • STORAGE_USAGE (2 hrs)
    • WAREHOUSE_METERING_HISTORY (3 hrs)

• Information schema

  • System-defined views and table functions that provide metadata about account objects
  • Based on SQL-92 ANSI, but with additional views and functions specific to Snowflake
    • ANSI uses 'catalog' to refer to databases, Snowflake does the same to stay compatible
  • Snowflake automatically creates INFORMATION_SCHEMA in every database
  • The schema contains the following:
    • Views for all objects in the database
    • Views for account-level objects
    • Table functions for historical and usage data across account
  • INFORMATION_SCHEMA is read-only
  • Queries on INFORMATION_SCHEMA do not guarantee consistency with concurrent DDL (objects created during the execution of the query may or may not appear)
  • Output depends on privileges of user's current role
  • Views are optimized to return small subsets of data, use filtering whenever possible

• Usage and Billing

  • Costs are based on usage of stored data, virtual warehouses, and cloud services
  • Data storage
    • Usage for data storage is calculated on the daily average amount of data (bytes) in:
      • Staging
      • Database tables
      • Fail-safes
      • Clones of database tables
    • Monthly cost is based on a flat rate per terabyte, type of account, and region
  • Virtual warehouses (compute)
    • Usage for virtual warehouses (compute) is calculated based on Snowflake credits consumed for:
      • Executing queries
      • Loading/unloading data
      • Performing other DML operations
    • Credits are charged based on number of VWs, their size, and how long they run
    • VWs come in ten sizes, each twice the power and cost of the previous
    • VWs are billed only when running, not when suspended
    • Credits are billed per second with a 60s minimum
  • Cloud services
    • Usage for cloud services is charged only if the daily consumption of cloud services is greater than 10% of the daily usage of compute

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