What is virtual Warehouse in Snowflake ?

                  Are you looking for details virtual warehouse? Are you also interested in knowing what role virtual warehouse plays in snowflakes? If so, then you reached write place, in this article we will learn about virtual warehouses in snowflake in detail.

A) What is Virtual Warehouse? 

                  Before knowing about virtual warehouse we need to know what is EC2? EC2 is also known as Elastic compute cloud which is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Now, we know what is EC2, Let's understand what is the virtual warehouse.

                  The virtual warehouse is an important layer in snowflake architecture and it consists of clusters of EC2  instances. The virtual warehouse is an abstraction by which each cluster is presented to a single user.

B) What is a worker node in the virtual warehouse? 

                   As we know virtual warehouse consists of a cluster of EC2 instances. The individual EC2 instance is called a worker node that performs given tasks. End-user never interacts with worker node. When users perform any action which involves virtual warehouse processing during such time users do not know how many worker nodes are working on and how they are performing tasks in the warehouse.

C) What are the virtual warehouse sizes? 

                   Virtual warehouses come with T-shirt sizes .currently available VW size are 

                   i) x- Small                                               vi ) 2x - Large 

                  ii) Small                                                   vii) 3x - Large 

                 iii) Medium                                              viii) 4x - Large 

                iv)  Large                                                     ix) 5x - Large 

                 v) x - Large                                                x) 6x - Large

D) Elasticity and Execution Engine 

                   Virtual warehouse comes with two important concepts Elasticity an Execution Engine . The VWs  are compute resources and these can be created , resized and destroyed at any point of time . This feature is Elasticity and has no effect on the state of persistant store or database .

                   The execution engine is implemented by a snowflake and it is a SQL execution engine. This engine is built based on the below features 

                        i) Columnar

                       ii) Vectorized 

                      iii) Push-based 

                     Learn more about snowflake here