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: h7bb7f6ab3a014498
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 5.5761132e-05
Overall Rank: 7,245 | 51.29%
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 5 of 5 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
8,274	Scaling GPU-Accelerated Databases beyond GPU Memory Size	2025	VLDB	5.3642256e-05
8,414	Workload-Aware Incremental Reclustering in Cloud Data Warehouses	2026	SIGMOD	5.3350162e-05
10,672	PTO: A Workload-driven Predictive Table Optimizer for Lakehouse Systems	2026	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
10,713	Robust Predicate Transfer with Dynamic Execution	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
10,909	Incremental Query Optimizer Statistics in Amazon Redshift	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-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	0.0010679641
34	The Design Of Postgres	1986	SIGMOD	0.00049142315
48	Weaving Relations for Cache Performance	2001	VLDB	0.00043805923
52	The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse	2016	SIGMOD	0.00041219077
71	DuckDB: an Embeddable Analytical Database	2019	SIGMOD	0.00037720227
195	Integrating Vertical and Horizontal Partitioning into Automated Physical Database Design	2004	SIGMOD	0.00025628849
216	Small Materialized Aggregates: A Light Weight Index Structure for Data Warehousing	1998	VLDB	0.00024485024
397	R* Optimizer Validation and Performance Evaluation for Local Queries	1986	SIGMOD	0.00019157058
1,036	Fine-grained Partitioning for Aggressive Data Skipping	2014	SIGMOD	0.00012377471
1,132	Qd-tree: Learning Data Layouts for Big Data Analytics	2020	SIGMOD	0.00011898257
1,210	Processing a Trillion Cells per Mouse Click	2012	VLDB	0.00011527605
1,515	DSB: A Decision Support Benchmark for Workload-Driven and Traditional Database Systems	2021	VLDB	0.00010417728
1,952	Quantifying TPC-H Choke Points and Their Optimizations	2020	VLDB	9.3189525e-05
2,139	Analytic Database Technologies for a New Kind of User - The Data Enthusiast	2012	SIGMOD	8.973568e-05
2,765	Instance-Optimized Data Layouts for Cloud Analytics Workloads	2021	SIGMOD	8.0439015e-05
2,811	Horizontal Data Partitioning In Database Design	1982	SIGMOD	7.9818853e-05
2,882	Optimal Column Layout for Hybrid Workloads	2019	VLDB	7.9116043e-05
3,073	Pushing Data-Induced Predicates Through Joins in Big-Data Clusters	2020	VLDB	7.6777283e-05
3,081	Skipping-oriented Partitioning for Columnar Layouts	2017	VLDB	7.6653727e-05
3,285	Performance-Optimal Filtering: Bloom Overtakes Cuckoo at High Throughput	2019	VLDB	7.4559907e-05
3,316	Cloud Analytics Benchmark	2023	VLDB	7.4373161e-05
4,756	Cuckoo Index: A Lightweight Secondary Index Structure	2020	VLDB	6.43221e-05
6,240	Predicate Caching: Query-Driven Secondary Indexing for Cloud Data Warehouses	2024	SIGMOD	5.8382355e-05
7,598	SageDB: An Instance-Optimized Data Analytics System	2022	VLDB	5.4871733e-05
8,495	Provenance-based Data Skipping	2022	VLDB	5.3304338e-05

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