Pruning in Snowflake: Working Smarter, Not Harder

Summary: Extends pruning from predicates to LIMIT, top-k, and JOIN, broadening pruning across workloads. Using min/max metadata and Iceberg-style formats, it prunes up to 99.4% of micro-partitions in Snowflake workloads and reveals higher real-world selectivity. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 7172
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 5.5736132e-05
Overall Rank: 7,660 | 47.45%
DOI: 10.1145/3722212.3724447

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Andreas Zimmerer (University of Technology Nuremberg)
2. Damien Dam (Snowflake)
3. Jan Kossmann (Snowflake)
4. Juliane Waack (Snowflake)
5. Ismail Oukid (Snowflake)
6. Andreas Kipf (University of Technology Nuremberg)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{zimmerer_sigmod25,
        title = {{Pruning in Snowflake: Working Smarter, Not Harder}},
        author = {Zimmerer, Andreas and Dam, Damien and Kossmann, Jan and Waack, Juliane and Oukid, Ismail and Kipf, Andreas},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '25},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3722212.3724447},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3722212.3724447},
        year = {2025}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
10,306	Workload-Aware Incremental Reclustering in Cloud Data Warehouses	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,485	PTO: A Workload-driven Predictive Table Optimizer for Lakehouse Systems	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,529	Robust Predicate Transfer with Dynamic Execution	2026	VLDB	5.093636e-05
10,985	Scaling GPU-Accelerated Databases beyond GPU Memory Size	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 25 of 25 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5	Optimal Aggregation Algorithms for Middleware [Extended Abstract]	2001	PODS	0.0010828372
34	The Design Of Postgres	1986	SIGMOD	0.00049302774
49	Weaving Relations for Cache Performance	2001	VLDB	0.00043781096
66	The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse	2016	SIGMOD	0.00038561587
103	DuckDB: an Embeddable Analytical Database	2019	SIGMOD	0.00034161428
199	Integrating Vertical and Horizontal Partitioning into Automated Physical Database Design	2004	SIGMOD	0.00025612088
227	Small Materialized Aggregates: A Light Weight Index Structure for Data Warehousing	1998	VLDB	0.00023958508
396	R* Optimizer Validation and Performance Evaluation for Local Queries	1986	SIGMOD	0.00019287574
1,044	Fine-grained Partitioning for Aggressive Data Skipping	2014	SIGMOD	0.0001244236
1,135	Qd-tree: Learning Data Layouts for Big Data Analytics	2020	SIGMOD	0.00012032847
1,225	Processing a Trillion Cells per Mouse Click	2012	VLDB	0.00011590013
1,832	DSB: A Decision Support Benchmark for Workload-Driven and Traditional Database Systems	2021	VLDB	9.6607418e-05
2,109	Analytic Database Technologies for a New Kind of User - The Data Enthusiast	2012	SIGMOD	9.1548967e-05
2,202	Quantifying TPC-H Choke Points and Their Optimizations	2020	VLDB	8.9639459e-05
2,855	Horizontal Data Partitioning In Database Design	1982	SIGMOD	8.0323779e-05
2,866	Optimal Column Layout for Hybrid Workloads	2019	VLDB	8.0175489e-05
3,035	Instance-Optimized Data Layouts for Cloud Analytics Workloads	2021	SIGMOD	7.8297746e-05
3,106	Skipping-oriented Partitioning for Columnar Layouts	2017	VLDB	7.7515666e-05
3,137	Pushing Data-Induced Predicates Through Joins in Big-Data Clusters	2020	VLDB	7.7204167e-05
3,510	Performance-Optimal Filtering: Bloom Overtakes Cuckoo at High Throughput	2019	VLDB	7.3561488e-05
3,838	Cloud Analytics Benchmark	2023	VLDB	7.0823175e-05
4,782	Cuckoo Index: A Lightweight Secondary Index Structure	2020	VLDB	6.5115802e-05
6,602	Predicate Caching: Query-Driven Secondary Indexing for Cloud Data Warehouses	2024	SIGMOD	5.8246665e-05
8,323	SageDB: An Instance-Optimized Data Analytics System	2022	VLDB	5.4539294e-05
8,889	Provenance-based Data Skipping	2022	VLDB	5.3512428e-05

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