What is an ad-hoc query?

An ad-hoc query is an unscheduled data query, often created when questions arise that are not able to be solved with predetermined or predefined datasets.

When to use ad-hoc queries

Ad-hoc queries are one of the most important and valuable types of analytics to support with your analytics infrastructure. Many of the most important analytical questions come to mind as a result of common business tasks and routine analysis. Many organizations support ad-hoc queries at any time through their business intelligence tools and data warehouse.

How Snowflake supports ad-hoc queries

Snowflake was designed to support ad-hoc queries of any kind. Its innovative architecture works particularly well with ad-hoc queries, because new compute resources can be spun up at any time to address ad-hoc queries without affecting the other operations that are happening on the database. Furthermore, all of the most common ad-hoc analytics tools (like Tableau, Looker, MicroStrategy, etc) connect directly to Snowflake, making it easy to analyze data with existing enterprise tool sets.