Retention of Unused Data in Snowflake Table

Simar Arora

Service Category

Storage

Cloud Provider

Snowflake

Service Name

Table Storage

Inefficiency Type

Excessive Data Retention

Explanation

Retention of stale data occurs when old, no longer needed records are preserved within active Snowflake tables. Without lifecycle policies or regular purging, tables accumulate outdated data.

Because Snowflake’s compute charges are tied to how much data is scanned, retaining large volumes of inactive or irrelevant data can drive up both storage and query execution costs unnecessarily.

Relevant Billing Model

Detection

Review table size growth trends over time to identify tables accumulating data without regular trimming
Analyze access patterns to determine whether older records are being queried or accessed by active workloads
Assess whether current business or regulatory requirements justify the retention period for older data
Identify opportunities to implement lifecycle policies or manual purging for data beyond the necessary retention window

Remediation

Implement data retention policies to regularly archive or delete records older than the required retention period (e.g., retain only 90 days of data if historical lookbacks are not needed beyond that)
Collaborate with business, analytics, and compliance teams to validate acceptable data retention thresholds
Purge old records to reduce table storage size and improve query performance by minimizing unnecessary data scans
Monitor table growth rates and periodically reassess lifecycle settings to ensure alignment with business needs

Relevant Documentation