Snowflake: Query Acceleration Service — The Warehouse Booster
The Query Acceleration Service (QAS) is now generally available to all Snowflake Accounts — Enterprise edition and up. It is a feature that allows Snowflake virtual warehouses to have essentially boundless amount of resources as it needs to accelerate parts of queries.
What is Query Acceleration Service?
It’s a common situation where a virtual warehouse takes workloads of varying sizes. Let’s say in a virtual warehouse, most queries finishes in about 10 minutes, some takes 30 minutes, and other much heavier queries takes hours to complete. Usually these heavy queries involves scanning large amounts of data and the warehouse resources are just not enough to handle it. In these situations you can increase the warehouse size, however that would automatically double the warehouse cost. The size increase may not even be a good idea in this case given that most of its workload is only light.
QAS is there so that virtual warehouses can temporarily borrow additional resources when required granting it the flexibility to expand and have as many resources as it needs. The best part is, there is no manual intervention required from the users. It just need to be enabled once and you’re good to go.
