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Snowsight provides a window into Snowflake performance but does not provide the
deep drill-down capability exposed in this book. I hope your efforts empower you to
both up-skill and deliver impactful business success by reducing costs and improving
your application code performance.
Let’s start by looking at design decisions made before a line of code is crafted.
Early Design Decisions
Design decisions made during the early stages of platform choice often have a decisive
impact on system performance. In this section, I discuss some points to consider when
implementing Snowflake.
As noted in Chapter 1, tuning the design is the most effective way of achieving
optimal performance. This step occurs before attempting to write any code. The same
advice applies when working with any technology, not just Snowflake. There are many
ways to implement poor designs and far fewer ways to implement good designs.
As Tony Robbins observes, “Complexity is the enemy of execution.” We
should strive to reduce complexity at every opportunity.
Snowflake Edition Costs
The edition of Snowflake you choose can have material impact on both cost and
feature availability. Throughout this book and for previous books in this series, I have
recommended all trial accounts be created using Business Critical Edition to ensure
the most complete feature set is available for use as you investigate Snowflake. But
Business Critical Edition is not the only option; compute costs per credit correlate to the
Snowflake edition chosen. You can find more information at
https://www.snowflake.
com/en/data-cloud/pricing-options/
.
When considering Snowflake, you must identify the minimum platform feature set
required to support your intended use case. Your applications may not use or require
every Snowflake feature, and you are wise to consult your cybersecurity colleagues for
their input before deciding on a Snowflake edition. I consider Business Critical Edition
to be the optimal edition for its security profile and extended capability for continuous
data protection (failover and client redirect).
ChapTer 10
OpTimizing perfOrmanCe