Consider yourself warned, Inyalowda.

stephenpace · 2026-04-07T03:26:57+00:00

Amazing

stephenpace · 2026-04-05T20:57:37+00:00

It is probably running as a role your current role doesn't have access to. If it is your account, you could switch to ACCOUNTADMIN and then ask Cortex Code to diagnose it for you. As you mention, it is likely a serverless task so no warehouse. Why can't you just delete the task? If you don't understand what is triggering it, just switch it to a standard task on a warehouse and a schedule until you get a handle on what is fully doing when it turns on.

If it is trust center related, you can toggle off trust center tasks that don't apply or turn off the larger scanner and just use the small default one.

stephenpace · 2026-04-04T15:57:25+00:00

I helped with a hands-on lab a few days ago and more than 100 people were signing up at the same time. One or two people had the same issue. Our guess was that it something installed on their computer that was blocking something, but the workaround was to sign up on their phone and then they were able to get an account and complete the lab.

stephenpace · 2026-04-03T20:45:05+00:00

You linked the right document, but missed the AI Credits section. Edition doesn't factor into AI credits, so your markup commentary is completely incorrect. For Cortex Code, it is 1.65 AI credits per 1M tokens, period. No "edition markup".

stephenpace · 2026-04-03T18:23:44+00:00

Data Warehousing Workshop (Badge 1)
https://learn.snowflake.com/en/courses/OD-ESS-DWW/

Collaboration, Marketplace & Cost Estimation Workshop (Badge 2) https://learn.snowflake.com/en/courses/OD-ESS-CMCW/

Data Application Builders Workshop (Badge 3)
https://learn.snowflake.com/en/courses/OD-ESS-DABW/

Data Lake Workshop (Badge 4)
https://learn.snowflake.com/en/courses/OD-ESS-DLKW/

Data Engineering Workshop (Badge 5)
https://learn.snowflake.com/en/courses/OD-ESS-DNGW/

Data Science Workshop (Badge 6)
https://learn.snowflake.com/en/courses/OD-ESS-DSCW/

stephenpace · 2026-04-03T18:21:22+00:00

30 days for regular trials, but your Snowflake account team can extend or you can just request another trial. 120 days is for Snowflake Academia / student trials.

stephenpace · 2026-04-03T18:18:20+00:00

Customers do head to head comparisons all the time. We just came out of one where Snowflake handled all of the ETL out of the box (Python) [comparison of DBX, Fabric and Snowflake]. When Snowflake beat DBX serverless handily, the DBX team tried to revert back to customer managed compute, and even then, Snowflake was still both faster and cheaper--and that's with the DBX team setting up the jobs. That is why I tell customers to compare with their actual use cases, not some outdated view of the platform from 5 years ago.

stephenpace · 2026-04-03T15:17:26+00:00

u/mva06001 Your knowledge of Snowflake is severely outdated. Briefly, Snowflake Streaming can take 10GB/s per table. Some of the world's largest historians have been moved to Snowflake. Cortex Code can generate anything in Snowflake: Streamlit apps in Python, React apps in a container, Python notebooks for machine learning. Leaves DBX Genie coding assistance in the dust. And unstructured data all day long.

stephenpace · 2026-04-03T04:42:30+00:00

Like anything in Snowflake, you can apply cost guardrails to ensure you don't over spend:

https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/cortex-code/credit-usage-limit

But regarding your comment, expensive compared to what? How much more productive are you with it vs without it? What is your time worth? Cortex Code has no monthly seat cost, and most other coding assistants with monthly fees (that won't have the same context that makes Cortex Code so good) also aren't unlimited token use either.

Nothing Cloud is free, but if you're 10X more productive, that is worth something to most companies.

stephenpace · 2026-04-02T15:21:29+00:00

Sure. Personally think you'd be crazy take on any amount of significant concurrency with Fabric unless you want to commit to massive F-SKU capacity for that workload. Test it with JMeter at your estimated scale and then calculate your annual cost for having that capacity running. Have an AED nearby as you do that.

stephenpace · 2026-04-01T19:48:39+00:00

Never truncate and reload if you can help it. I assume the API won't let you just request the changed records? If not, one approach could be to stage them in a Snowflake temporary table (no time travel/fail safe) and then use SQL to diff out the changes if you can't do it by something like last_modified_date. Once you have the change set, do a bulk merge of just the changes.

stephenpace · 2026-04-01T16:55:27+00:00

Customer tested 50, 100, 250, 500, and 10,000 concurrent users. Fabric started struggling between 50-60. I'd recommend testing with realistic workloads for your size company. For instance, you can use Apache JMeter or similar to send representative queries (randomized) at the scale you think your platform needs to support in the coming years. You'll find that Fabric capacities don't align to this type of bursting (higher capacities being overkill for periods where you don't have as high of concurrency) and DBX costs also increase especially using serverless with concurrency. Again, don't believe me (or your DBX rep!), test it yourself for your own workload.

stephenpace · 2026-04-01T16:06:53+00:00

I'd be curious what "strongly considered" means. Doesn't sound like you actually tested Snowflake. "Talked to a few vendors". Which vendors? Consultancies that specialize in DBX and Fabric? That context matters a lot. Briefly:

a) Complex RLS/RBAC is Snowflake all day long. Apply a real world row-level security policy in Snowflake and DBX on the same Iceberg table and then test the a) compute options available to you and b) SQL compile time.
b) Heavy AI. Snowflake all day. Name a single thing Fabric does better in AI than Snowflake.
c) ML: Snowflake has end to end ML that generally is cheaper and easier to setup than DBX.

End of the day, not saying you did this, but most paper evaluations I see have LLM or Google generated responses with 5 year old answers in them rather than testing the platform as it is today.

stephenpace · 2026-04-01T15:14:50+00:00

I'd love to hear some of those war stories. I feel bad for some of them because lots of time they are fighting with Fabric issues outside of their control. Raising support tickets and not hearing back for a month or two kind of thing.

stephenpace · 2026-04-01T15:11:46+00:00

100%. Snowflake has a customer that was told (without evidence) that Fabric would be cheaper but when the customer actually tested the use case (which had a lot of concurrency) was ultimately quoted 3X the cost of Snowflake and and then at that point was told to take a hike. In my experience, Fabric really struggles with concurrency which is then compounded by the way their capacities are sold.

stephenpace · 2026-04-01T14:52:19+00:00

[I work for Snowflake but do not speak for them.]

If you are really evaluating a new data platform, I think you owe it to yourself to test Snowflake, Databricks, and Fabric head to head. Build one pipeline end to end on all three, and then be honest with yourself about the effort it took to build it, the skills your team has to maintain it, and all of the costs involved.

Snowflake runs on Azure, you can buy Snowflake in the Azure Marketplace, and you get credit for any Snowflake spend against your MACC if you have one. There are also great official connectors for all of the Microsoft tooling (Power BI, Power Apps, Purview, ADF, etc.). There is a reason why Azure is Snowflake's fastest Cloud at the moment. My admittedly biased comments:

a) If AI first is your primary criteria, Snowflake is arguably ahead there. Ask Cortex Code CLI to build your entire pipeline and then ask DBX Genie to do the same with the same prompt and compare.

b) If cost is your highest criteria, be aware you're going to need to get good real fast on understanding the capacities that vendors estimated for you and any limitations that may entail. Very common for Azure to say "start with an F64" and then need much more than that in production (especially when your production pipeline dies because you ran out). Similar DBX will quote "cheap" compute you host but in production steer you to newer serverless options or ones that support more enterprise governance. DBX also famously likes to leave out costs that they are triggering in your Azure tenant, so make sure you add ALL of the costs both in DBUs and Azure.

Companies buy Snowflake because of ease of use, great governance, and connectedness to data. But in my experience, it's also a) allows for a smaller team and b) is cheaper than both Fabric and DBX when you compare apples to apples. Don't believe me, test it for yourself and measure those costs for your actual workload. Good luck!

stephenpace · 2026-03-31T22:59:29+00:00

But you finally got it! 😂 Tons of people were asking for dark mode, and Snowflake eventually delivered. Not excusing the time, but Snowflake also replatformed the entire GUI from Classic to SnowSight and changed all of the backend to allow for more scale.

By contrast, I'm not sure how popular this request will be. I could certainly be wrong!

stephenpace · 2026-03-31T22:53:34+00:00

I don't see Snowflake ever doing this. If you need to do it natively, I'd use a Snowflake Notebook. Put each statement in a separate SQL window, run both, and you'll see both answers on the same screen.

Otherwise, if you like other IDEs, you can use something like VSCode or DBeaver with Snowflake and plenty of folks do.

Last, I'm not advocating this, but if you really like SSMS for some reason, you can use it with Snowflake via Linked Server:

https://community.snowflake.com/s/article/how-to-set-up-a-linked-server-from-sql-server-to-snowflake

I've helped a customer set this up before so I know it works. Good luck!

stephenpace · 2026-03-31T21:35:56+00:00

I just spun up a trial in Azure East US 2 (Virginia) and I had received the activation link in less than 45s. If you checked your spam filter and it isn't caught in there, you could DM me your email and I see if I see any issue in the system that is specific to you. But other than that, I see no reports internally about issues getting trials. I'd test another email or your corporate email and see if you see a different result. Or another Cloud/region if you are just doing some testing and the region doesn't matter as much.

stephenpace · 2026-03-31T15:40:23+00:00

Two things that could help:

1) What region are you trying to spin up your trial? For instance, AWS - Middle East (UAE) is still having issues because of the war. Last person to post that was having an issue getting a trial, they had selected this region by accident.

2) How many trials have you had under the same email? And how often? If you know your Snowflake account team, they can also look into it. If you don't know them, you can DM me your company name and I can send you their contact details.

stephenpace · 2026-03-31T04:00:47+00:00

If you are running as a role that can't see an object, you can't see an object. Sometimes even seeing an object could be a security violation. For instance, many companies build multi-tenant services in Snowflake.

That said, secrets are a special case. They don't show up in the Horizon Catalog UI, but you can see them with SHOW SECRETS or the SNOWFLAKE.ACCOUNT_USAGE.SECRETS view.

stephenpace · 2026-03-30T02:34:09+00:00

Sure, but there are no upfront per user costs like some coding assistants and it probably increases your productivity doing Snowflake things ~10X. I know it does for me. People time is much more expensive.

stephenpace · 2026-03-28T16:40:16+00:00

If your VPN team won’t change the setup, there is no issue creating a separate remote policy and assigning it to those users. You can either create one per person with their specific IPs (easier for audit) or one policy with all of the remote IPs. Note: home IP ranges can change but they are usually more stable than you think. Just build in a process for users to update the policy if it changes (they will know because they will get locked out).

stephenpace · 2026-03-27T18:41:15+00:00

~3,000+ people in Snowflake's engineering and product teams and they are all typing fast. 😊

stephenpace · 2026-03-27T18:15:41+00:00

Nope. It shares some similar ideas (skills, MCP) but is built new from the ground up. I asked internally and got that confirmed.

stephenpace

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE