Snowflake — Top 25 Highly Recommended Interview Questions

Ryan Arjun
7 min readApr 28, 2024

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing technology that enables the scalable and safe storing and processing of structured and semi-structured data. It isolates storage, computing, and query processing, enabling elastic scalability and optimal resource use.

💎How does Snowflake mitigate latency issues between its separated compute and storage layers, especially when handling large-scale data analytics workloads?

Snowflake’s architecture comprises of three layers: storage, computing, and services. The storage layer stores data in columnar format in cloud storage, and the compute layer handles query processing and execution. The services layer oversees metadata, security, and access control. Multi cluster architecture of snowflake enables multiple compute clusters to access the same underlying data concurrently. This architecture eliminates the need to move data between compute nodes, reducing data transfer latency and improving query performance. Each compute cluster operates independently, executing queries in parallel to achieve faster results.

--

--

Ryan Arjun

BI Specialist || Azure || AWS || GCP — SQL|Python|PySpark — Talend, Alteryx, SSIS — PowerBI, Tableau, SSRS