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Alec Dutcher
Alec Dutcher

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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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