TopolearnWarehouse settings are the main lever on your Snowflake bill.
A virtual warehouse is a named compute cluster. Sizes go X-Small, Small, Medium, Large, X-Large and up to 6X-Large; each step doubles both the compute and the credits per hour (X-Small uses 1 credit per hour, Small 2, Medium 4, and so on).
Billing is per second, with a 60-second minimum each time a warehouse starts. Two settings keep that cheap:
AUTO_SUSPEND = 60suspends the warehouse after 60 idle seconds. Suspended warehouses cost nothing.AUTO_RESUME = TRUEstarts it automatically when a query arrives, usually within a second or two.
Choosing a size: a bigger warehouse makes a single large query faster, roughly in proportion for scan-heavy work, so doubling size for half the runtime costs the same credits. It does not help many small queries waiting in line; that is a concurrency problem, solved by multi-cluster warehouses or separate warehouses per workload. Start small, check query times and the queue in the query history, and resize with ALTER WAREHOUSE at any time; running queries finish on the old size.
A warehouse also keeps a local cache of the data it has read. Suspending it drops that cache, so very short auto-suspend times can make BI dashboards slower. Values between 60 seconds and a few minutes are typical.
Example
CREATE WAREHOUSE IF NOT EXISTS analytics_wh
WAREHOUSE_SIZE = 'XSMALL'
AUTO_SUSPEND = 60 -- seconds idle before suspending
AUTO_RESUME = TRUE
INITIALLY_SUSPENDED = TRUE;
USE WAREHOUSE analytics_wh;
-- Temporarily scale up for a heavy backfill, then back down
ALTER WAREHOUSE analytics_wh SET WAREHOUSE_SIZE = 'LARGE';
-- ... run the backfill ...
ALTER WAREHOUSE analytics_wh SET WAREHOUSE_SIZE = 'XSMALL';
SHOW WAREHOUSES LIKE 'analytics_wh';
-- name: ANALYTICS_WH state: SUSPENDED size: X-Small auto_suspend: 60 ...Remember
- Each size step doubles compute and credits per hour
- Per-second billing with a 60-second minimum per resume
- Always set AUTO_SUSPEND and AUTO_RESUME
- Bigger size speeds big queries; more clusters help concurrency
Watch out for
- Leaving a warehouse running with a long or no auto-suspend, burning credits while idle.