Road to Snowflake SnowPro Core Certification: Micro-partitions

Fourth Chapter: Micro-partitions

Fourth Chapter of the Snowflake SnowPro Core Certification Complete Course.

This chapter will study how Snowflake stores data internally using micro-partitions. These are the key concepts that we are going to review:

1. Micro-partitions in Snowflake
2. Snowflake Pruning Process
3. Typical SnowPro exam questions regarding micro-partitions

Remember that all the chapters from the course can be found in the following link.

SNOWFLAKE MICRO-PARTITIONS

All data in Snowflake tables are automatically divided into micro-partitions, contiguous units of storage between 50 and 500MB of uncompressed data, organized in a columnar way. They are the physical structure of the tables. This is important, as they usually ask this question in the Snowflake SnowPro Core exam.

A table is organized into Micro Partitions in Snowflake (via docs.snowflake.com).

Micro partitions are immutable, meaning they cannot be changed once created. If a row is updated, the micro-partition holding the row is copied into a new micro-partition, where the updated row will be inserted.