Snowflake Metadata query results

Snowflake is a columnar database and it stores the meta information of all the columns in a table. e.g, Number of rows in each partition, the total number of partitions, distinct values for the column in each partition and so on. So when you issue a command like,

SELECT COUNT(1) FROM HR.EMPLOYEE;

Snowflake just uses the metadata layer to process this information and it should return the results of the above query, without even,

• Hitting the underlying table
  
• Thereby saving on your compute costs
  

Similarly, the MAX() or MIN() functions work too without hitting the actual table. 

DataFreak

posted on 10 Dec 18