Explanation
The benefits of Snowflake's approach to partitioning table data include:
In contrast to traditional static partitioning, Snowflake micro-partitions are derived automatically; they don't need to be explicitly defined up-front or maintained by users.
As the name suggests, micro-partitions are small in size (50 to 500 MB, before compression), which enables extremely efficient DML and fine-grained pruning for faster queries.
Micro-partitions can overlap in their range of values, which, combined with their uniformly small size, helps prevent skew.
Columns are stored independently within micro-partitions, often referred to as columnar storage. This enables efficient scanning of individual columns; only the columns referenced by a query are scanned.
Columns are also compressed individually within micro-partitions. Snowflake automatically de-termines the most efficient compression algorithm for the columns in each micro-partition.