Getting started with Snowflake: warehouses, databases and schemas

New Snowflake users often confuse warehouses with databases. They are completely separate things.

Storage vs compute

• Database → schema → table is where your data lives (storage).
• A virtual warehouse is a cluster of compute that runs your queries. It holds no data.

Because they are separate, you can run a small warehouse for dashboards and a large one for heavy ELT – both reading the same tables, without copying data.

Three habits that save money

1. Set AUTO_SUSPEND = 60 so idle warehouses stop billing.
2. Start with X-Small and scale up only when a query is really slow.
3. Use separate warehouses per workload so you can see who spends what.

CREATE WAREHOUSE wh_bi WITH WAREHOUSE_SIZE = 'XSMALL' AUTO_SUSPEND = 60 AUTO_RESUME = TRUE;