What is the aim of Snowflake's Search Optimization Service?

• A. Significantly improve the performance of the Snowflake caches
• B. Significantly improve the performance of selective point lookup queries on tables.
• C. Significantly improve the performance of consumers while doing SELECT clauses
• D. None

Answer: (B)

The function of Snowflake's Search Optimization Service is to speed up selective point lookups by giving Snowflake an index-like aid to quickly locate the micro-partitions that may contain the matching rows. Instead of scanning a large portion of the table, Snowflake uses the extra search optimization data to prune partitions and touch only the relevant ones, which reduces I/O and latency for queries with highly selective predicates (for example, filtering on a single, high-cardinality value or a small IN list). This is about accelerating targeted lookups, not about general cache performance or all SELECT operations.