What might cause a query to spill to remote storage in Snowflake?

• A. The amount of memory available for the warehouse node is insufficient to hold intermediate results, causing data to spill to local and remote storage.
• B. The warehouse is in a paused state.
• C. The query uses an excessive number of nested subqueries.
• D. The data set is cached in memory.

Answer: (A)

Spilling to remote storage happens when the memory available to the compute node isn’t enough to hold all the intermediate results the query needs. In Snowflake’s execution flow, data is processed in memory as much as possible, but if the intermediate data grows beyond what memory can accommodate, the engine writes those results to temporary storage—first to local scratch space and, if needed, to remote cloud storage. That memory pressure is what drives the spill to remote storage, allowing the query to continue instead of failing. So the best explanation is that insufficient memory to hold intermediate results leads to spilling. If the warehouse is paused, nothing runs; more nested subqueries can increase memory needs but don’t inherently cause spills unless they push beyond available memory. If data is already cached in memory, there’s less need to spill.