Achilleus gives us an overview of SnowflakeDB:
There is no dark magic involved in improving the efficiency of your queries. Based on whom you ask this can be considered as a standout feature or a major hindrance but I am not a fan of tuning queries according to my workload as I feel the way data evolves so quickly in organizations. It becomes more tricky to play catch up to turn the all necessary knobs to make the query faster.
Snowflake claims they tune all the queries “automagically” via a dynamic query optimization engine. No need for any indexes, updating statistics, partition keys or pre-shard data for even distribution when you scale up. All of this will be done by their patent-pending dynamic optimization.
But I still feel snowflake can work on providing the necessary knobs for people who would like to tune their queries.
Read the whole thing. In short, it’s a technology worth looking at, but it’s not going to work perfectly in all cases.