
Snowflake External Tables Explained: Setup, Performance Tuning, and the Iceberg Decision
TL;DR Snowflake external tables let teams query data stored in AWS S3, Azure Blob, or Google Cloud Storage using standard SQL without moving files into Snowflake. They store only file-level metadata, are strictly read-only, and support CSV, Parquet, JSON, Avro, ORC, and XML formats. Performance depends heavily on partitioning and file sizing. For recurring production workloads, Apache Iceberg tables are








