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Data & Analytics · Intermediate

Micro-Partition

Snowflake's immutable, automatically created columnar storage units, each holding 50-500 MB of uncompressed data with min/max metadata per column.

Definition

Snowflake partitions all tables automatically into micro-partitions and uses their metadata to prune scans. DML creates new micro-partitions rather than editing existing ones, which enables Time Travel and zero-copy cloning.

Exam tip

Micro-partitions are automatic and immutable; users don't define them but can influence pruning with clustering keys.

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