Context

Customers often want to estimate the approximate cost of enabling time travel for specific tables in Snowflake before actually implementing it. This helps with budgeting and planning storage costs for their data warehouse.

Answer

Unfortunately, there is no mechanism to estimate time travel costs in advance using Select or any other method. The costs cannot be predicted accurately before enabling the feature.

Time travel costs depend heavily on how frequently your tables are updated:

• For tables with infrequent updates, time travel costs may be only a small fraction of your active storage cost

• For frequently updated tables, time travel costs can be up to 10 times the active storage cost, as older micro partitions are constantly being rewritten

The only way to determine actual time travel costs is to:

1. Enable time travel for your specific tables

2. Monitor the storage costs over time

3. Analyze the cost impact based on your actual usage patterns

This monitoring approach will give you the exact numbers needed for accurate cost planning and budgeting decisions.