1. What is the difference between Snowflake and traditional databases?
Snowflake architecture separation of storage and compute allows you to scale them independently. In legacy databases like Oracle or Teradata, computing resources are tied directly to the storage, meaning scaling query power requires purchasing more physical disk blocks.
2. What is Zero-Copy Cloning in Snowflake?
Cloning creates a new table or schema without making physical duplicates of the micro-partition files. Snowflake simply duplicates the metadata pointing to those partitions, making it instant and free until you perform modifications on the cloned set.