Lunch Talk: Workload Insights From The Snowflake Data Cloud - What Do Production Analytic Queries Really Look Like?

Workload Insights From The Snowflake Data Cloud: What Do Production Analytic Queries Really Look Like?

Join us for our Lunch Talk in July 2025. We’re very happy that Sebastian Breß from the DIMA group will present his work on “Workload Insights From The Snowflake Data Cloud: What Do Production Analytic Queries Really Look Like?".

The BIFOLD Lunch Talk series gives BIFOLD members and external partners the opportunity to engage in dialogue about their research in Machine Learning and Big Data. Each Lunch Talk offers BIFOLD members, fellows and colleagues from other research institutes the chance to present their research and to network with each other.

The Lunch Talk takes place at the TU Berlin. For further information on the Lunch Talks and registration, contact Dr. Laura Wollenweber via email.

Abstract: Capturing the characteristics of real-world analytical workloads is challenging yet critical for advancing industry practices and academic research. Historically, obtaining accurate query and data characteristics has been difficult, largely because detailed workload information has often been confined to on -premises database systems. With the rise of cloud-native databases like Snowflake, it has become possible to analyze production query workloads at scale and in greater detail. Leveraging this capability, this study presents a comprehensive analysis of analytics workloads across diverse customers and industries. In particular, we investigate the query characteristics of 667 million queries issued by the most popular
BI tools against Snowflake over a two-week period. Based on this dataset, this paper makes two primary contributions: first, we conduct a detailed examination of query properties – particularly focusing on filters, joins, aggregations, and other previously underexplored aspects; second, we uncover unique and practically relevant query patterns that are typically absent from standard database benchmarks

Sebastian Breß held a postdoctoral researcher postion at DIMA from November 2015 until October 2020. Afterwards, he joined Snowflake as a Senior Software Engineer.

For further Information, please use this link linkedin.com/in/sebastian-breß-7b5831183