Tables

Data in Snowflake is stored in tables, which, as discussed, are one of the fundamental components of data modeling. However, before exploring them in a modeling context, we should understand the various table types that exist in Snowflake and their costs.

The previous chapter described Snowflake’s Time Travel, a feature that allows restoring dropped objects or querying data at a prior point in time. However, Time Travel comes with associated storage costs, and the number of available Time Travel days—known as the retention period—depends on the table type, as we’ll shortly review in detail.

Snowflake also offers a managed type of Time Travel, known as Fail-safe. All permanent tables have a Fail-safe period of seven days. Unlike Time Travel, which the user can access, Fail-safe is managed by and accessible only to Snowflake to protect user data from disasters such as system failures and data breaches. To recover data stored in Fail-safe, users...