In addition to automatic performance improvements, we also continue to invest heavily in improving features that help customers better optimize their workloads. Automatic Clustering, Materialized Views and Search Optimization are major examples of this, and they all accelerate your queries via intelligent data-processing techniques. These features were designed from the ground up to be easy to configure with zero maintenance, so you can focus on getting results from your data as fast and efficiently as possible.
Automatic Clustering helps optimize tables where queries repeatedly filter, aggregate or join on the same columns. Simply specify a clustering key, and Snowflake automatically maintains your table in a well-clustered state. Since the start of 2024, we have delivered several significant performance and efficiency improvements under the hood to the core execution engine of Automatic Clustering that, altogether, have reduced Automatic Clustering maintenance costs by more than 10% on average. One of our biggest customers saw cost reductions of over 30%, and we observed up to 50% cost reductions for certain tables.
Likewise, we have been making substantial investments in the performance and efficiency of the Search Optimization Service and Materialized Views. Search Optimization is a robust feature that improves the performance of point lookup queries, highly selective queries and queries involving large volumes of semi-structured data, such as application, network or infrastructure logs by an order of magnitude. This optimization works seamlessly with Snowflake’s new SEARCH function, which allows users to search for exact characters or text within specific columns or across multiple tables. Together, these capabilities are particularly valuable in the observability domain, especially for log analytics and cybersecurity, where billions of rows need to be analyzed in near real time. A Snowflake Materialized View precomputes (“materializes”) a data set from a query — and automatically maintains the results to be up-to-date and consistent — to improve the performance of frequent or complex queries (like BI dashboard views of sales or usage data, or analyses of semistructured data).
As a result of our investments, we are thrilled to pass on the cost reductions to customers: As of Aug. 1, we have reduced the price for maintaining Search Optimization and Materialized Views by 80% in all deployments. (See the updated credit rates in Table 5 of the Consumption Table on the Snowflake Pricing page.)
