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Snowflake

~3m skim, 568 words, updated Dec 8, 2025

A modern data engineering platform.

Contents

Snowflake¶

Snowflake is a cloud native database that provides a wealth of analytical and data mining features for processing, integrating, and presenting data. Data platform could be used to describe Snowflake, as it offers features traditionally found in data warehouses, lakes, and streaming-processing platforms like Kafka.

COF-C02 - Snowpro Core Certification¶

You can download the study guide for this exam on the Snowflake COF-C02 Exam Guide page. This guide is updated frequently, so go and request your own copy if possible. It is a 100-question, 115-minute test.

Here is a copy from when I initially took the Snowpro Core training:

SnowPro Core COF-C02 Exam Study Guide 2025 [pdf]​

Why Snowflake?¶

Topics:

• Fully managed: no hardware or server provisioning required
• Compute / storage decoupled
• Auto-scaling, auto-suspend, etc.
• Support for semi-structured data (JSON, VARIANT, etc.)
• Zero-copy cloning, time travel, data sharing
• Strong ecosystem and connector support

Key Concepts & Architecture¶

Topics:

• Snowsight UI (web interface)
• SnowSQL (CLI)
• Notebooks (Snowflake Notebooks)
• Architecture: hybrid of shared-disk and shared-nothing.
  • Central storage + multiple MPP compute clusters.
• Snowflake Documentation
• Cloud Platforms: Runs on AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Snowflake Documentation
• Micro-partitions (internal detail)
• Compute / Storage separation
• Zero-copy cloning, Time Travel, Fail-safe

Editions & Pricing¶

Topics:

• Editions: Standard, Enterprise, Business Critical, Virtual Private Snowflake (VPS)
• Pricing model: credits for compute + storage + usage
• How edition differences affect features (e.g. multi-cluster, data protection)

Core Objects & DDL¶

Topics:

• Databases, Schemas, Tables, Views
• External Tables, Streams, Tasks
• Sequences, Stages
• Examples of CREATE / ALTER / DROP
• Cloning & object versioning

Data Loading & Unloading¶

Topics:

• Stages: internal (user, table, named) vs external cloud stages
• Snowflake Documentation
• COPY INTO / bulk load
• Snowpipe (continuous ingestion)
• Snowflake Documentation
• Snowpipe Streaming
• Loading semi-structured data and schema inference

Querying & DML¶

Topics:

• SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, MERGE
• Joins, subqueries, functions
• Working with semi-structured data (VARIANT, OBJECT, ARRAY)
• Window functions, CTEs, analytic SQL
• Transforming data in Snowflake

Warehouses & Compute¶

Topics:

• What is a warehouse; required for queries / DML
• Snowflake Documentation
• Warehouse sizes and billing
• Snowflake Documentation
• Auto-suspend, auto-resume
• Multi-cluster warehouses
• Best practices for compute sizing & concurrency

Performance & Cost Optimization¶

Topics:

• Choosing warehouse sizes vs concurrency
• Pruning / clustering / clustering keys
• Caching, result caching
• Query profiling / query history
• Avoiding overprovisioning / idle compute

Security & Access Control¶

Topics:

• Account access
• Roles, users, grants, privileges
• Snowflake Documentation
• Object-level permissions
• Row access policies, masking policies
• Network / IP policies, secure views, encryption

Integration & Connectors¶

Topics:

• JDBC, ODBC, Python connector
• Spark / Snowflake connector
• Kafka Connector
• BI tools (Tableau, Power BI, etc.)
• Data marketplace & data sharing

Snowpark (Python, Java, Scala APIs)¶

Python is common - as the lingua franca of data scientists.

Advanced Features¶

Topics:

• Time Travel & Fail-safe
• Zero-copy cloning
• Materialized Views
• Tasks & scheduled pipelines
• Search optimization service
• Streams & Change Data Capture (CDC)

Tips, Best Practices & Gotchas¶

Topics:

• Avoid leaving warehouses running unnecessarily
• For small queries, very large warehouses may not help
• Use clustering only when needed
• Be aware of billing granularity (per second)
• Watch out for too many small files in load
• Query patterns that can disrupt performance

References & Further Reading¶

Snowflake has tons of interesting documents in their resource library , including migration advice, using Snowflake as a backing database for agents, and much more.

Topics:

• Official Snowflake documentation (docs.snowflake.com)
• Snowflake Documentation
• Tutorials (“Snowflake in 20 minutes”)
• Snowflake Documentation
• Quickstarts & hands-on labs
• Snowflake Quickstarts
• SQL command reference
• Snowflake Documentation