Optimising Snowflake Performance for Digital i using Account Usage Analytics

Challenge

Digital i provides viewing analytics to broadcasters and streaming platforms, helping clients track content performance, audience behaviour, and competitive positioning. With the addition of YouTube streaming analytics, the volume of data being ingested into their Snowflake environment increased rapidly.

This surge raised concerns about rising compute costs and potential performance bottlenecks. Digital i realised they needed to assess their current Snowflake setup, uncover inefficiencies, and ensure that their data infrastructure could scale without compromising cost-control or speed.

Solution

Butterfly Data conducted a comprehensive review of how Digital i was using Snowflake, making use of Snowflake’s built-in Account Usage views. The review examined metrics such as:

• Query history
• Database storage usage
• Warehouse metering

These were used to highlight inefficiencies across both storage and compute operations. The data collected was then aggregated and visualised via SQL queries, Snowsight dashboards, and interactive notebooks built with Plotly. These visualisations made it possible to clearly illustrate areas for optimisation, helping Digital i's team prioritize the next steps.

Impact

The analysis revealed that storage costs were minimal in comparison with compute costs, meaning that optimisation efforts should focus on performance and compute efficiencies rather than storage. Butterfly Data identified specific opportunities to streamline queries in both client-facing dashboards and the ingestion pipelines.

Digital i received a tailored optimisation report, along with a walkthrough presentation. With these insights, the team is now equipped to plan and prioritise implementation actions to enhance performance, reduce costs, and confidently scale operations.