Snowflake glossary
Key Snowflake certification terms and acronyms.
Definitions are AI-assisted and reviewed for general accuracy — verify critical details against Snowflake's official documentation.
Clustering Key
One or more columns (or expressions) defined on a Snowflake table to co-locate similar values in the same micro-partitions, improving query pruning.
COPY INTO
A Snowflake SQL command used to bulk-load data from a stage into a table or unload data from a table into a stage.
DACDiscretionary Access Control
An access control model in Snowflake where every object has an owner who can grant privileges on that object to other roles.
Data Sharing
A Snowflake mechanism that lets accounts share live, read-only database objects with other accounts without copying or transferring data.
Dynamic Data Masking
An Enterprise+ column-level security feature that applies masking policies at query time to hide or partially obscure sensitive data from unauthorized roles.
Fail-safe
A non-configurable 7-day data recovery period after Time Travel expires, accessible only by Snowflake support for disaster recovery.
Materialized View
A pre-computed view in Snowflake that stores query results and is automatically maintained by a background service when base data changes.
Micro-partition
Snowflake's fundamental storage unit, storing 50–500 MB of uncompressed data in columnar format with automatic metadata collection.
Multi-Cluster Warehouse
A virtual warehouse configuration (Enterprise+) that automatically adds or removes compute clusters to handle concurrency spikes.
Private Link
A Business Critical+ feature that routes traffic between a customer's cloud VPC/VNet and Snowflake over a private network endpoint, bypassing the public internet.
RBACRole-Based Access Control
Snowflake's primary access control model where privileges are granted to roles, and roles are assigned to users or other roles.
Result Cache
A Snowflake cache that stores query results for 24 hours; identical subsequent queries return cached results without using warehouse compute.
Secure View
A Snowflake view type that hides the view definition from non-owners, preventing data inference through query optimization details.
Snowflake Edition
A licensing tier (Standard, Enterprise, Business Critical, VPS) that determines available features such as multi-cluster warehouses and data masking.
Snowflake Marketplace
A platform within Snowflake where providers publish and consumers discover and access third-party and first-party data sets via Data Sharing.
Snowpipe
A Snowflake continuous data ingestion service that loads files from a stage into a table automatically and near-real-time.
Stage
A named location (internal or external) in Snowflake used to store data files before loading or after unloading.
Streams
Snowflake objects that record DML changes (inserts, updates, deletes) made to a table, enabling change data capture patterns.
Tasks
Snowflake scheduler objects that execute a single SQL statement or stored procedure on a defined schedule or when triggered by a stream.
Time Travel
A Snowflake feature that allows querying, cloning, or restoring data from a previous point in time up to 90 days depending on edition.
Transient Table
A Snowflake table type that has a maximum Time Travel retention of 1 day and no Fail-safe period, reducing storage costs for temporary data.
TriSecret Secure
A Business Critical+ encryption option combining Snowflake-managed and customer-managed keys (via cloud KMS) so neither party alone can decrypt data.
Virtual Warehouse
A cluster of compute resources in Snowflake that executes SQL queries and DML operations, billed per second of active use.
Warehouse Cache
Also called local disk cache; SSD storage on virtual warehouse nodes that caches micro-partition data to speed up repeated queries.
Zero-Copy Cloning
A Snowflake feature that creates a copy of a database, schema, or table without duplicating underlying storage until data diverges.