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Snowflake owes much of its performance benefits to "micro-partitions" [1]. BigQuery is a worthwhile comparison. MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Vertica are not close equivalents.

[1] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/snowflake-automatic-clus...

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That's an interesting look at their internals; I wasn't aware of their dynamic sorting feature.

At read time, though, Snowflake's zone map is the same as Redshift's and Vertica's; you'll see similar pruning for many queries.

Redshift however doesn't prune during joins, which is a huge deficiency.

Snowflake looks more flexible about getting the data into its final ordering.

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