Do Snowflake warehouses use indexes?

Snowflake does not use traditional B‑tree or bitmap indexes like many RDBMSs. Instead, it automatically partitions data into micro‑partitions based on the order of data ingestion. These micro‑partitions are sorted on the clustering keys, which allows the query engine to prune large portions of data during scans. Snowflake also supports automatic clustering, where the system reorganizes micro‑partitions in the background to maintain optimal clustering. Because of this, manual index creation is unnecessary and not supported. If you need faster query performance on specific columns, you can define clustering keys or use materialized views, but these are not the same as traditional indexes.