2024 Performance Improvements¶

Important

Performance improvements often target specific query patterns or workloads. These improvements might or might not have a material impact on a specific workload.

The following performance improvements were introduced in 2024.

Released	Description	Impact
May 2024	Improved join order decisions by calculating selectivity estimates with more granularity.	Reduces compilation time and query execution time by calculating selectivity estimates at the micro-partition level.
May 2024	Faster loading time for Python.	Improves performance for Streamlit in Snowflake apps (including Streamlit apps within a Snowflake Native App), Python worksheets, Python UDFs, and stored procedures in Python.
April 2024	Improved broadcast join decisions.	Reduces query execution time and improves memory management by optimizing broadcast joins in scenarios like right-deep join trees.
April 2024	Faster query results in Snowsight.	Reduces the time it takes for query results to appear when run in Snowsight. Improvements are most noticeable for queries that return result sets larger than 10,000 rows.
March 2024	Improved query performance as a result of more accurately calculating selectivity estimates in order to optimize the order of joins.	Reduces execution time when there are mismatches between partition metadata and actual cardinality from join filters.
March 2024	Improved performance for loading JSON files.	Results in lower ingestion latency of up to 25% for many JSON loading scenarios.
February 2024	Support for the `upper` and `lower` collation specifications added to some functions.	Ability to set the `upper` and `lower` collation specifications for some functions. The `upper` and `lower` collation specifications perform better than the `ci` specification for some use cases. The `upper` and `lower` collation specifications are now supported for the following functions: CHARINDEX, CONTAINS, ENDSWITH, POSITION, SPLIT, SPLIT_PART, and STARTSWITH. For more information, see Differences between ci and upper / lower.
January 2024	Improved execution time for LIMIT 0 queries.	Reduces execution time for queries that use a count of `0` with LIMIT, which is often used by applications to return column headings and data types for query results.
January 2024	General Availability of larger warehouses (5X-LARGE and 6X-LARGE) in Microsoft Azure regions, excluding Azure Government regions.	Ability to use larger compute resources for memory-intensive queries compared to smaller warehouses.