What does the term 'Bytes spilled to remote storage' indicate in the Snowflake query profiler?

• A. A New Snowflake function to process data in the remote storage.
• B. The local disk is insufficient to fit the spilled data, so Snowflake writes to remote cloud storage.
• C. The time spent on network data transfer.
• D. The operation completed in memory.

Answer: (B)

Spilling to remote storage shows what happens when a query produces more intermediate data than can fit in memory. When memory runs short, Snowflake writes that intermediate data to remote cloud storage (the managed cloud storage used by Snowflake) so the processing can continue. The metric “Bytes spilled to remote storage” is the amount of data that was moved out of memory to those remote locations during the query, not a separate function or just time spent on network transfer. A larger spill amount signals memory pressure and can hint at potential slowdowns due to extra I/O, while operations typically spilling are large sorts, joins, or aggregations with big intermediate results.