Snowflake has rolled out Generation 2 Standard Warehouses (Gen2), the latest evolution of its cloud data platform architecture.
So, what’s new with Gen2? Think of it as a smarter, faster version of Snowflake’s original virtual warehouse. It’s built on high-performance hardware and includes software-level enhancements that make key operations (like DELETE, UPDATE, MERGE, and table scan operations) run more efficiently.
What does that mean for you? Faster queries, improved data throughput, and better resource utilization. In many cases, you’ll be able to complete more work in less time. Of course, the actual impact depends on how your Snowflake configuration is set up and what kind of data workloads you’re managing.
What’s new in Snowflake’s latest Gen2 Standard Warehouses?
Snowflake’s Generation 2 Standard Warehouses bring several critical enhancements that elevate performance, scalability, and efficiency. Here’s a closer look at the standout improvements:
Performance Improvements
At the core of Gen2 is a significant leap in processing power. By running on upgraded, next-generation hardware, Gen2 warehouses can handle data-intensive operations more swiftly and reliably. In addition, Snowflake has introduced intelligent software optimizations that enhance core SQL operations—particularly DELETE, UPDATE, MERGE, and complex table scans. These improvements minimize query latency, boost throughput, and help your workloads complete faster, especially under heavy usage.
Enhanced Concurrency
With Gen2, Snowflake has addressed one of the key challenges in data warehousing: supporting high-concurrency environments. The revamped architecture is designed to better manage multiple concurrent sessions and processes. This means more users, more queries, and more pipelines can run in parallel without causing slowdowns. Whether you're running BI dashboards, data pipelines, or real-time analytics, Gen2 is built to maintain performance even under load.
Efficient Resource Utilization
Another major benefit of Gen2 is smarter resource allocation. The new architecture optimizes compute resource usage, which means you may not need to scale up to a larger warehouse size to meet performance needs. For many organizations, this can translate to significant cost savings. Gen2 also handles workload spikes more gracefully, reducing the need to overprovision compute resources.
How Can Revefi Help?
FinOps methodologies within Snowflake are centered on enhancing cost transparency and driving efficiency, which is particularly important for Gen2 warehouses due to its higher credit consumption levels.
Snowflake offers granular insights through Account and Organization usage views, allowing detailed monitoring across dimensions like users, tasks, and warehouses.
Revefi allows Snowflake customers to trial the new Gen2 warehouse experience. This feature enables users to temporarily convert their existing warehouses to Gen2, providing them with an opportunity to evaluate its performance and suitability for their needs and then decide the right timing for the switch.
With the latest feature addition to Revefi’s dashboard, users can easily set up their Gen2 Standard warehouse and run trial performance diagnostics to measure speed, and concurrency.
Users can also view an end-to-end analysis of their Gen2 Standard Warehouse, and gauge overall query performance.
An important thing to note: When the trial run of their Gen2 Standard Warehouse runs out, users’ configuration will revert to previous configurations unless toggled on to Gen2.
What's next?
Now that you have experimented with Gen 2 warehouses, now let us explore how Revefi can continue to help you.
If you need to help drive down costs and improve performance, our AI Agent for Data Spend Optimization helps you tailor warehouse sizes to actual workload requirements and utilize auto-suspend and auto-resume to eliminate charges from idle resources.
Efficiency is further improved through SQL query tuning and leveraging result caching to reduce redundant processing.
For scenarios with high user demand, multi-cluster warehouses provide scalability without excess expenditure.
Revefi enhances this process by offering AI-driven insights into workload patterns and optimization strategies. One organization uncovered thousands of dollars in wasted credits within a week by removing inactive, unused (or “zombie”) warehouses.
Together, these practices support smarter, more cost-effective operations across Snowflake’s newly launched Gen2 Standard Warehouses.
Conclusion
Snowflake Gen2 Standard Warehouses introduce architectural advancements that enable greater elasticity, concurrency, and throughput.
However, these benefits also introduce new operational challenges.
As workloads become more parallelized and dynamic, traditional monitoring approaches fall short. And in the era of agentic AI solutions, Revefi’s AI Agent for Data Spend Optimization helps you keep a track of Snowflake Warehouse performance by:
- Monitoring your data warehouses to understand where snowflake credits are being wasted, and providing real-time insights on warehouse utilization
- Analyzing query activity to facilitate immediate efficiency improvements
- Empowering finance and data teams with a unified view of data spending for better decision-making and accountability
In short, Revefi's AI Agent for Data Spend Optimization transforms your data management journey from a reactive black box to a transparent and managed asset.
