Summary of data types¶

Snowflake supports most SQL data types. The following table provides a summary of the supported data types.

Category	Type	Notes
Numeric data types	NUMBER	Default precision and scale are (38,0).
	DECIMAL, NUMERIC	Synonymous with NUMBER.
	INT, INTEGER, BIGINT, SMALLINT, TINYINT, BYTEINT	Synonymous with NUMBER, except precision and scale can’t be specified.
	FLOAT, FLOAT4, FLOAT8	^[1]
	DOUBLE, DOUBLE PRECISION, REAL	Synonymous with FLOAT. ^[1]
String & binary data types	VARCHAR	Default (and maximum) length is 16,777,216 bytes.
	CHAR, CHARACTER	Synonymous with VARCHAR, except the default length is VARCHAR(1).
	STRING, TEXT	Synonymous with VARCHAR.
	BINARY
	VARBINARY	Synonymous with BINARY.
Logical data types	BOOLEAN	Currently only supported for accounts provisioned after January 25, 2016.
Date & time data types	DATE
	DATETIME	Alias for TIMESTAMP_NTZ
	TIME
	TIMESTAMP	Alias for one of the TIMESTAMP variations (TIMESTAMP_NTZ by default).
	TIMESTAMP_LTZ	TIMESTAMP with local time zone; time zone, if provided, isn’t stored.
	TIMESTAMP_NTZ	TIMESTAMP with no time zone; time zone, if provided, isn’t stored.
	TIMESTAMP_TZ	TIMESTAMP with time zone.
Semi-structured data types	VARIANT
	OBJECT
	ARRAY
Structured data types	ARRAY	Currently only supported for Iceberg tables.
	OBJECT	Currently only supported for Iceberg tables.
	MAP	Currently only supported for Iceberg tables.
Geospatial data types	GEOGRAPHY
Geospatial data types	GEOMETRY
Vector data types	VECTOR

_{[1] A known issue in Snowflake displays FLOAT, FLOAT4, FLOAT8, REAL, DOUBLE, and DOUBLE PRECISION as FLOAT, even though they are stored as DOUBLE.}

Note

You can also load unstructured data into Snowflake. For more information, see Introduction to unstructured data.