Clustering Keys

Overview

Micro-partitions are the foundation of Snowflake's storage architecture. Clustering Keys are a mechanism to explicitly organize data within these micro-partitions to dramatically improve query performance by maximizing partition pruning.

Key Concepts

Natural Clustering

As data is inserted into Snowflake, it is naturally clustered chronologically (by insertion order). For many tables, especially immutable log data, this natural clustering (e.g., by date) is sufficient for good performance.

Clustering Keys