Virtual Warehouses

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Related Topics

• Understanding Snowflake Virtual Warehouse, Storage, and Cloud Services Usage

• Working with Resource Monitors

• Warehouse & Resource Monitor DDL

A virtual warehouse, often referred to simply as a “warehouse”, is a cluster of compute resources in Snowflake. A warehouse provides the required resources, such as CPU, memory, and temporary storage, to perform the following operations in a Snowflake session:

• Executing SQL SELECT statements that require compute resources (e.g. retrieving rows from tables and views).

• Performing DML operations, such as:

  • Updating rows in tables (DELETE , INSERT , UPDATE).

  • Loading data into tables (COPY INTO <table>).

  • Unloading data from tables (COPY INTO <location>).

Note

To perform these operations, a warehouse must be running and in use for the session. While a warehouse is running, it consumes Snowflake credits.

Next Topics:

• Overview of Warehouses
• Multi-cluster Warehouses
• Warehouse Considerations
• Working with Warehouses
• Monitoring Warehouse Load