What's the Difference? Incremental Processing with Change Queries in Snowflake

Summary: Snowflake introduces CHANGES queries and STREAM objects to query and consume incremental changes to tables over time. We detail semantics, discuss implementation challenges, report production usage, and contrast with other change-query offerings. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 6699
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2023
Pagerank: 4.427232e-05
Overall Rank: 8,909 | 38.03%
DOI: 10.1145/3589776

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
10,417	Streaming Democratized: Ease Across the Latency Spectrum with Delayed View Semantics and Snowflake Dynamic Tables	2025	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
10,577	Agamotto: Scheduling of Deadline-Oriented Incremental Query Execution under Uncertain Resource Price	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 12 of 12 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
95	Maintaining Views Incrementally	1993	SIGMOD	0.00050896659
288	Storm @Twitter	2014	SIGMOD	0.00028939871
314	MillWheel: Fault-Tolerant Stream Processing at Internet Scale	2013	VLDB	0.00028084774
522	Differential dataflow	2013	CIDR	0.00021099241
544	Apache Calcite: A Foundational Framework for Optimized Query Processing Over Heterogeneous Data Sources	2018	SIGMOD	0.00020521965
944	Cayuga: A General Purpose Event Monitoring System	2007	CIDR	0.00015141297
1,548	Structured Streaming: A Declarative API for Real-Time Applications in Apache Spark	2018	SIGMOD	0.00011431383
2,338	Samza: Stateful Scalable Stream Processing at LinkedIn	2017	VLDB	9.00711e-05
3,008	FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store	2021	SIGMOD	7.7239608e-05
4,822	Consistency and Completeness: Rethinking Distributed Stream Processing in Apache Kafka	2021	SIGMOD	5.8959131e-05
5,130	One SQL to Rule Them All – an Efficient and Syntactically Idiomatic Approach to Management of Streams and Tables	2019	SIGMOD	5.6755067e-05
7,305	Tempura: A General Cost-Based Optimizer Framework for Incremental Data Processing	2021	VLDB	4.7678776e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,920	Shared Arrangements: practical inter-query sharing for streaming dataflows	2020	VLDB	5.8241888e-05
4,673	Continuous Analytics: Rethinking Query Processing in a Network-Effect World	2009	CIDR	6.0058653e-05
2,597	Continuous Queries in Oracle	2007	VLDB	8.4713998e-05
8,415	Pruning in Snowflake: Working Smarter, Not Harder	2025	SIGMOD	4.5197687e-05
5,727	Enabling Incremental Query Re-Optimization	2016	SIGMOD	5.3510544e-05
8,884	Workload Insights From The Snowflake Data Cloud: What Do Production Analytic Queries Really Look Like?	2025	VLDB	4.4283999e-05
8,047	Thrifty Query Execution via Incrementability	2020	SIGMOD	4.5983505e-05
7,893	Changing Flights in Mid-air: A Model for Safely Modifying Continuous Queries	2011	SIGMOD	4.6240987e-05
5,967	Change Propagation Without Joins	2023	VLDB	5.250976e-05
10,417	Streaming Democratized: Ease Across the Latency Spectrum with Delayed View Semantics and Snowflake Dynamic Tables	2025	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05