Appendix
Glossary of Terms
Average Latency
The average total query execution time, including all phases of query processing: compilation, queueing, and execution.
Snowflake Credit
A unit of measure Snowflake uses to quantify computational resources consumed during operations. Snowflake bills at a negotiated cost per credit.
Keebo Organization
Each customer has one Keebo organization. All accounts and warehouses are managed within this organization.
Compute
Snowflake credits consumed by virtual warehouse usage. Snowflake uses a per-second billing model with a minimum charge of 60-second increments.
Cloud Services
Snowflake credits consumed by non-query activities such as authentication, metadata management, and query optimization. These credits are only billed if they equal 10% or more of total spending.
Query Template
A common query structure shared across multiple queries, excluding variables and constants that frequently change. Workload Intelligence uses query templates in Spend Analytics to group similar queries.
Workload
A user-defined group of queries based on specific criteria such as warehouses or users. Workloads enable analysis of which groupings contribute the most to cost or performance issues.
Bytes Scanned
The total amount of data read from storage to execute a query. More costly queries typically scan more bytes of data.
Total Local and Remote Spillage
Spillage occurs when a query requires more memory than is available in the virtual warehouse. Spillage increases latency, with remote spillage causing a more severe impact than local spillage.
Memory Inefficient
A warehouse is considered memory inefficient when its queries scan 20% more remote bytes when compute resources are already available compared to when additional resources must be provisioned.
Query Imbalance
Warehouses with queries whose execution time is 10 times higher than the warehouse average are considered to have query imbalance.
Underprovisioned
A warehouse is considered underprovisioned if the percentage of queries with spillage to remote or local storage is 5% or more.
Imbalance Factor
A metric that evaluates the uniformity of query workloads in a warehouse. Higher values indicate more significant imbalances. Formula: Imbalance Factor = (total execution time of all outlier queries) / (total execution time of all queries) * 100
Wasteful Queries
Queries that frequently fail, resulting in wasted Snowflake credits.
Unused Tables
Tables created over 90 days ago that have not been accessed or modified in the last 90 days.
Unread Tables
Tables modified but not read in the last 90 days. These tables may be constantly updated by an automated process while no one reads them.
Active Size
Bytes owned by and billed to a table that are in the active state.
Time Travel
A Snowflake feature that provides access to historical versions of changed or deleted data within a defined retention period.
Fail-Safe
A Snowflake feature that provides an additional layer of data recovery beyond Time Travel. It retains deleted or changed data for seven days after the Time Travel period ends, allowing Snowflake to recover data in case of system failures or accidental data loss.
Retained for Clone
A Snowflake feature that preserves deleted or changed data for short periods to support zero-copy cloning. This enables creating clones of tables, schemas, or databases without duplicating data storage.
Total Size
The sum of Active Size, Time Travel, Fail-Safe, and Retained for Clone bytes. This represents the total amount of storage billed for a table.