Snowflake
Snowflake Code Bundles: Python without stored procedures
Snowflake Code Bundles let you package and run Python and Spark on Snowflake compute without stored procedures. Here is what ships, what it costs, and when to use it.
Data Today Snowflake Desk
The Snowflake Desk writes production guides to new Snowflake features: what shipped, what it costs in credits, and how to roll it out without surprising your bill. It works from Snowflake's release notes and documentation, line by line.
The Data Today Snowflake Desk is a research workflow that monitors primary sources and drafts analysis. Every piece is reviewed, edited, and signed off by Lars Cornelissen, responsible editor at Data Today. Corrections go to [email protected].
Sources this desk works from:
- Snowflake release notes
- Snowflake documentation
- Snowflake service consumption table
Responsible editor: Lars Cornelissen, responsible editor.
Contact: [email protected].
Recent articles
Snowflake
Snowflake per-user quotas GA: the AI credit kill switch
Admins can now set daily and monthly AI credit limits per person in Snowflake, with GA per-user quotas blocking overspend within minutes.
Snowflake
Snowflake Postgres data mirroring explained
Snowflake Postgres data mirroring continuously replicates Postgres tables into Snowflake using Iceberg with 30-second lag. It replaces external CDC connectors with serverless compute and open formats.
Snowflake
Snowflake DCM Projects GA: declarative IaC inside the warehouse
Snowflake DCM Projects GA brings declarative infrastructure-as-code to Snowflake with DEFINE statements and plan-then-deploy. Eight capabilities remain in Preview, including masking policies and streams.
Snowflake
Cortex AI Gateway: Snowflake's agent governance layer
Governing 100+ MCP servers, Snowflake's Cortex AI Gateway centralizes AI agent access and cost, but most features are still in private preview.
Snowflake
Snowflake tag-based data protection policies: a governance shift
Snowflake tag-based data protection policies entered public preview on July 21, 2026, letting you attach row access, aggregation, projection, and join policies to tags. Objects with the tag auto-inherit the policy, cutting policy attachments from thousands to one per group.
Snowflake
Snowflake workload identity federation kills static credentials
With GA workload identity federation, Snowflake acts as an OIDC provider so workloads use short-lived tokens instead of static credentials, at no extra cost.
Snowflake
Dynamic Iceberg table replication, costed honestly
Dynamic Iceberg table replication now keeps Snowflake managed Iceberg pipelines in DR plans, but refresh and transfer costs move to the target account.
Snowflake
Snowflake Adaptive Compute changes AWS cost models
GA on AWS in six regions, Snowflake Adaptive Compute brings query-level billing and a 1.2x benchmark edge over Gen2 warehouses.
Snowflake
Snowflake Dynamic Tables refresh gets a cost test
Snowflake Dynamic Tables now claim up to 2.8x faster refresh on Gen2 warehouses, but the cost win depends on target lag and change volume.
Snowflake
Snowflake Hybrid Tables get faster without request fees
Row-store Snowflake Hybrid Tables handle OLTP-style work, and new preview optimizations report up to 8 times the throughput.
Snowflake
Snowflake Iceberg ADLS writes are finally usable
Azure teams can now read and write externally managed Iceberg tables in Snowflake without moving storage, through GA ADLS support.
Snowflake
ICEBERG_MERGE_ON_READ_BEHAVIOR changes Iceberg DML
Set to AUTO, Snowflake's GA ICEBERG_MERGE_ON_READ_BEHAVIOR switch sends 3 of 4 Iceberg table cases to merge-on-read.
Snowflake
Building an AI agent on your Snowflake data with Cortex Agents
Cortex Agents let you build an AI agent that reasons across structured tables, unstructured documents, and custom tools inside Snowflake. It orchestrates a plan-act-reflect loop, and the bill is the sum of four meters you need to watch.
Snowflake
Snowflake Cortex: running LLMs where your data already lives
Snowflake Cortex AI exposes LLMs as SQL functions like AI_COMPLETE and AI_CLASSIFY, so you run inference without moving data out. It is billed per token by model, and cost swings roughly 40x between a small model and a frontier one, so model choice is the budget.
Snowflake
Cortex Analyst: let business users query Snowflake in plain English
Business users ask questions in plain English and get SQL answers with Cortex Analyst. Accuracy depends on your semantic view; billing is per message.
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Cortex Search: the managed RAG engine inside Snowflake
Snowflake's Cortex Search runs managed hybrid search for RAG without a vector database, but its several meters bill serving compute even when idle.
Snowflake
Snowflake Gen2 warehouses: faster compute you have to opt into
Snowflake Gen2 standard warehouses run on faster hardware and finish most queries quicker, but they bill at a higher credit rate and you often have to switch with a SQL clause. Whether they save money depends entirely on whether the speedup beats the rate.
Snowflake
Snowflake RBAC and masking: lock it down without grinding to a halt
Granting privileges to roles instead of users collapses thousands of Snowflake grants to a few hundred, and one masking policy protects many columns.
Snowflake
Should you put your data lake in Snowflake Iceberg tables?
Snowflake Iceberg tables store data in open Apache Iceberg format in your own cloud storage, so Snowflake bills zero storage and other engines can read it. The catch: only Snowflake-managed catalog tables get full platform support, external-catalog tables lose clustering, cloning, and replication.
Snowflake
Snowflake Openflow: managed ingestion built on Apache NiFi
Built on Apache NiFi, Snowflake Openflow moves data from any source into Snowflake, running inside Snowflake or in your own VPC, each billed differently.
Snowflake
Snowflake clustering: when a clustering key actually pays off
Snowflake clustering keys reorganize micro-partitions so queries prune more of the table. On a well-clustered date column a one-day query can scan 140 micro-partitions instead of 9,800, but automatic clustering bills credits, so it only pays on big, filtered, slow-changing tables.
Snowflake
Dynamic Tables vs Streams and Tasks: which Snowflake pipeline to build
Dynamic Tables let you declare a SELECT and a target lag and let Snowflake refresh it; Streams and Tasks give you imperative control. Dynamic Tables bottom out at a 60-second minimum lag, so sub-minute freshness still means Snowpipe Streaming or Tasks.
Snowflake
Snowflake warehouse sizing: stop paying for idle compute
Snowflake warehouse sizing sets your credit burn: each size up doubles credits per hour, so a 4XL costs 128 credits per hour against an XS at 1. Right-size by workload, not by habit.