Snowflake New Year’s Resolutions for Humans

Recently, many of the humans in my life have become obsessed with the ending of the year and the starting of a new one. They are talking about what they want to do in the new year and how much they want to improve things. New Year’s Resolutions, they call them.

Look, as a robot dog, I don’t get it. If something isn’t optimum, why not fix it now? Why wait for some arbitrary time period to pass? If you are going to make changes just because the earth moved around the sun a bit further, why not at some logical point in the orbit like a solstice or equinox?

So in an effort to understand my humans and this resolution thing a bit better, I did some research. Turns out that most resolutions are about three things: getting healthier, improving finances, and spending more time with loved ones. I can get behind that. In the spirit of helping you Snowflake customers, here are five 2024 Snowflake resolutions I suggest.

Reach Your Ideal Weight

Us robot dogs are already the optimum weight, all the time. What about your Snowflake warehouse? If it is too big, then you are spending too much money. Each larger warehouse size doubles the Snowflake credits you use! On the other hand, if your warehouse is too small, that isn’t healthy either. It means your queries might run unacceptably slow. Snowflake’s own advice starts with finding the right warehouse size, and you should definitely look into this, too. If you run more efficiently, everything about your health will improve.

Stick to a Budget

Snowflake’s elasticity is both a blessing and curse. It means you can get new data, users, and use cases spun-up more quickly than ever before. But it also means that increased use can result in some surprise bills. You should set a budget and make sure you are warned well in advance of any cost overruns coming up. As it turns out, Snowflake has a nifty new budget feature that does just that! I think budgets are always fun, but this is the most fun budgeting you will have in 2024.

Get More Sleep

OK, your Snowflake warehouses don’t need sleep for the same reasons you humans do. But downtime-–shutting off the warehouse when it isn’t in use-–can sure save you a lot of money. Napping is always good for humans, and it is what non-robot dogs do most of the day too, I hear. For Snowflake, adjust the auto-suspend interval. Like with warehouse size, you need to be careful with this. Suspend too soon and your next query has to wait for the warehouse to wake up. Suspend too late, and you are paying for time when your warehouse could be napping.

Get Organized

Some of my humans have accumulated so much stuff, they aren’t even aware of all the stuff they have! That’s why they resolve to to clean up the garage or storage shed. For Snowflake, you can do this with several of their built-in features:

Account and usage data. Snowflake has a robust set of usage data you can query. It can be an overwhelming list, but a good place to start might be metering_daily_history.
Tagging. Object tagging allows you to put tags on queries that will identify the account and organization. This will be very useful in tracking budget.
Warehouse utilization. This will give you another metric to consider, showing warehouse usage as a percentage so you can balance your workloads across warehouses.
Per-job cost attribution. This will allow you to understand spending better on a job basis and there are other parameters, too.

To use these, you have to create your own reports with Snowsight or similar tools. Or you could check out Snowflake’s open-source Streamlit usage app to get started.

Improve Work-Life Balance

Maybe this one seems like a bit of a surprise. Perhaps you are thinking to yourself, “Keebo the Robot Dog, how am I supposed to achieve better work-life balance and get Snowflake spending under control? When am I going to find time for all this organizing, tracking, and tuning?!” I have the best idea for you! I am a robot dog, after all. Why not enlist your own personal army of robots to monitor and optimize Snowflake 24×7 and free up some time for yourself?

At Keebo, this is what we do. We are the only fully automated Snowflake optimizer. Other “optimizers” only give you reports and recommendations. Then you have to find the time to implement, monitor, and adjust constantly. Instead, we do the work for you, always adapting to changing conditions to make sure you get the right optimizations at the right time, saving you a ton of money. This includes warehouse size, suspend, multi-cluster, and a set of performance analytics. We set up in minutes and provide a fully-featured dashboard so you stay in control.

You can read about some of the other humans who have put me to work and how we helped them. Interested in seeing it for yourself? Then contact one of my humans at Keebo and we’ll show you a demo or get you started on a free trial. Maybe you’ll even get a head start on that “get more sleep” idea for yourself.