Immuta Snowflake Credit Cost

Content List

1. Snowflake pricing, editions, and storage model

2. Virtual warehouses and credits

3. Snowflake Storage details

4. Virtual warehouse costs breakdown

5. Identify how many “CREDITS_USED_CLOUD_SERVICES” by the Immuta Application.

1. Snowflake pricing, editions, and storage model

Snowflake decouples compute and storage, and each has a different pricing model. Check Snowflake official site for latest updates.

• Pricing depending on region for both credit on editions and storage usage type. More info here: Pricing Options

• There different editions Snowflake offers per/credit at the time of this write up:

  • Standard - introductory level

  • Enterprise (includes all features from Standard) - large-scale enterprise

  • Business Critical (includes all features from Enterprise)- higher level of data protection for very sensitive data

  • Virtual Private (includes all features from Business Critical)- highest level of security from Snowflake documentation

• Storage has two different offers per/month:

  • Capacity Storage - pay upfront for defined capacity size

  • On-Demand Storage - pay only what you used

2. Virtual warehouses and credits

• A snowflake credit is a unit of measure, and it is consumed for virtual warehouse(size) being active not the number of SQL executed.

• Each credit is priced differently based on region and platform(AWS, Azure, GCP)

• Snowflake credits are billed by the second with a one-minute minimum on active warehouse

• Recommended to set auto-suspend and auto-resume for warehouse configuration

• Warehouses consume credits depending on the size: Overview of warehouses | Snowflake Documentation

  • There is a significant difference on credit consumption between an X-Small and 4X-Large.

3. Snowflake Storage details

• Snowflake storage cost details can be found here: Pricing Options

• Storage is charged based on the daily average storage used for the month.

  • Using the ACCOUNTADMIN role, go to “Account” → “Billing & Usage” will have the average storage used.

  • Storage is combined of database storage, stage objects, and fail safe.

• Data transfer (i.e stage objects for loading data to snowflake) within the same region is free while cross-region incurs a cost.

• Capacity Storage - pay upfront for defined capacity size

• On-Demand Storage - pay only what you used

4. Virtual warehouse and storage cost breakdown

• Each region and platform price Snowflake editions differently.

• Virtual Private Edition pricing - contact Snowflake

• More Snowflake pricing details here: Pricing Options

5. Identify how many “CREDITS_USED_CLOUD_SERVICES” by the Immuta Application

• The "SNOWFLAKE"."ACCOUNT_USAGE"."QUERY_HISTORY" table has a column “CREDITS_USED_CLOUD_SERVICES” which shows how many credit each executed SQL statement used and this is based on the the “TOTAL_ELAPSED_TIME” - and the time is calculated by the start_time and the end_time of the SQL execution.

  • The QUERY_HISTORY table also holds the SESSION_ID info on which session the SQL statement was executed by.

• Use ACCOUNTADMIN and run the following to get a small sample of this QUERY_HISTORY table:

select * from "SNOWFLAKE"."ACCOUNT_USAGE"."QUERY_HISTORY" limit 10;

• The "SNOWFLAKE"."ACCOUNT_USAGE"."SESSIONS" table holds detail of each session(SESSION_ID column) connected to Snowflake from which application. The application info is stored in the “CLIENT_ENVIRONMENT” column on this table; this column is a JSON object.

• Use ACCOUNTADMIN and run the following to get a small sample of this SESSIONS table:

select * from "SNOWFLAKE"."ACCOUNT_USAGE"."SESSIONS" limit 10;

• Review the CLIENT_ENVIRONMENT column(JSON Object) to find all “APPLICATION” connected and executed SQL on Snowflake.

• By identifying which session_id executed SQL coming from the Immuta application, you can determine which SQL statements were run by Immuta, how long they executed, and the credits consumed. The following query provides these details by querying the QUERY_HISTORY table and performing an INNER JOIN with the SESSIONS table using the SESSION_ID. It then filters for entries where the APPLICATION field in the CLIENT_ENVIRONMENT JSON object equals IMMUTA.

SELECT h.* FROM "SNOWFLAKE"."ACCOUNT_USAGE"."QUERY_HISTORY" h 
  INNER JOIN "SNOWFLAKE"."ACCOUNT_USAGE"."SESSIONS" s 
  ON s.session_id = h.session_id 
  WHERE GET(parse_json(s.client_environment), 'APPLICATION') = 'IMMUTA' limit 25;

• Outcome example:

• With the above information, you can build your own query to determine how often, how long, and how much Snowflake credit Immuta incurs in Snowflake.