2026 Performance improvements

Important

Performance improvements often target specific query patterns or workloads. These improvements might or might not have a material impact on a specific workload.

The following performance improvements were introduced in 2026:

Released

Description

Impact

January 2026

Improved query performance with Snowflake Optima Metadata, which continuously analyzes your workload patterns and creates metadata to optimize pruning of unused micro-partitions. Snowflake Optima is only available on Snowflake generation 2 standard warehouses (Gen2).

Improves performance of queries by creating metadata for more efficient pruning.

January 2026

Improved pruning for join queries with inequality predicates. For example, the following join query uses the > operator in an inequality predicate:

SELECT *
  FROM employees e, managers m
  WHERE e.employee_id = m.employee_id AND
        e.salary > m.salary AND
        m.level = 'M5';

For this query, Snowflake prunes micro-partitions from the employees table where all salaries are below the lowest M5 manager salary.

Improves the performance of join queries that have inequality predicates.