Snowflake is available in four editions. If you signed up for a free trial, you will be on the lowest edition - standard. As you might imagine, the higher the edition, the more features it offers. The four editions are:
- Standard
- Enterprise
- Business Critical
- VPS
Standard is the basic edition, and will give you access to most things you need. However, if you're studying for the SnowPro Core certification you may want to look at using Enterprise edition. This has lots of additional features, including extended Time Travel (90 days as opposed to 1 day), additional security options like row and column-level security and enhanced query acceleration in certain cases. I plan to use Standard edition for my studying, if I need to update to Enterprise for any reason I'll update this blog post.
The Business Critical edition used to be called Enterprise for Sensitive Data, which gives you an idea of what this edition offers. This is the edition to go for if you need to store any business-sensitive data, and it supports standards like PCI DSS, ITAR and IRAP. You can also use various cloud features to connect to Snowflake privately, e.g. using AWS PrivateLink.
The final edition is quite specialized - Virtual Private Snowflake (VPS). It's likely only the biggest corporate customers use this edition. Snowflake is essentially a multi-tenant system. Most accounts are sharing resources, even though Snowflake is ensuring everybody's data is separate and secure. But for some organisation types, like banks or credit lenders, that doesn't pass muster. That's who VPS is aimed at. VPS gives these organisations their own instance of Snowflake, completely isolated from all other accounts. This obviously costs a lot more!
Take a look at Snowflake's documentation to see what is offered by each edition.
How do I find out my Snowflake edition?
There are multiple ways to discover your current edition.
- Use the Snowsight Web interface - go to Admin and click on Accounts
- Open a new SQL worksheet and execute the SHOW ORGANIZATION ACCOUNTS command
How do I change my Snowflake edition?
If you want to shift from, say, Standard to Enterprise, you need to contact Snowflake Support.