Question

A data engineer runs an identical aggregation query twice within a few minutes. The underlying tables have not changed, and the second execution returns results almost instantly without consuming any virtual warehouse compute credits. Which layer of the Snowflake architecture is responsible for enabling this behavior?

Accepted Answer

The Cloud Services layer, which manages the query result cache and metadata

Answer

The Compute layer, which caches results locally on the virtual warehouse SSD

Answer

The Database Storage layer, which stores query outputs in micro-partitions

Answer

The virtual warehouse's multi-cluster controller, which reuses idle clusters