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Snowflake Data Compression ratio and effectiveness

All the data that is stored in Snowflake are compressed by default. You heard it right, its automatic and by default. You dont have to choose the compression algorithms, columns or anything, its all being taken care internally by the system

Effeciveness of Snowflake Data Compression

Compresssion ratio is subjective and highly depends on the data. It is difficult to generalize the compression ratio. Snowflake Compression could reduce the size of your data atleast 3:1 compression ratio to as good as 10:1 compression

Snowflake Data Compression and potential savings on Storage bill

High (and fast-growing) costs for data storage was holding companies back until Snowflake was able to provide a route to lower storage costs, with data compression and a low cost per terabyte (TB)

Snowflake Charges Twenty-three dollars per terabyte (post compression size)

  • Google BigQuery charges $23/TB/month storage for uncompressed data. With Snowflake’s new $23/TB/month price, Snowflake is significantly less expensive because Snowflake storage prices apply to compressed data. Snowflake enables at least a 3:1 compression ratio, reducing Snowflake’s effective storage cost to $8/TB/month or less.
  • Microsoft’s Azure SQL Data Warehouse requires Azure Premium storage, which costs at least $88/TB/month – four times more than Snowflake’s new pricing of $23/TB/month.
  • Redshift’s dense storage option of $1000/TB/year and its dense compute price of $5500/TB/year far exceed Snowflake’s price of $360/TB/year for storage. Adding the annual Snowflake compute activity for the average customer, Snowflake costs much less than either of these options.
  • Oracle and Teradata charge exponentially higher prices than Snowflake for their cloud and on-premises data warehouse solutions.
  • Snowflake charges customers only for actual storage usage after compression. Oracle, Redshift, Teradata and most other data warehouses require paying for large systems even when much of the storage often goes unused.

Benefits of Snowflake Compression

  1. Storage costs lower than native cloud storage due to compression
  2. No storage costs for on disk caches
  3. Near zero storage overhead for data cloning or data sharing


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