How Many Nodes Are in a Snowflake Virtual Warehouse?
Snowflake’s virtual warehouses come in a variety of different sizes, from X-Small to 6X-Large. But how many CPU nodes does each virtual machine actually have available for data analytics queries? Here’s the answer.
Snowflake data warehouse uses “virtual warehouses” (also called simply “warehouses”) as an abstraction to represent computing power. Snowflake warehouses allow you to execute data analytics queries in a performant, cost-effective manner using Snowflake’s proprietary SQL query engine. Similar to virtual machines in other data platforms, the warehouses in your Snowflake account have a fixed size that you or your data engineer must specify in advance.
The objective of choosing the size for a Snowflake warehouse is to provide a consistent query time for your data set. In other words, you choose the size of your Snowflake warehouses in order to produce predictable performance.
It’s reasonable to think about “nodes” (CPU nodes, or virtual machines) as a way of measuring the size of a warehouse, though Snowflake’s documentation doesn’t use the term nodes.
Instead, Snowflake uses the term “credits,” since credits are how you pay for…
