Snowflake · security

Row-level policies without performance panic

2026-03-27 · Nadia Heng

Row access policies are powerful and easy to over-apply. We profiled a reporting workload before and after tightening policies.

You will see annotated queries that show predicate selectivity and where secure views were the lighter choice.

We also document how we communicated latency changes to business stakeholders without turning the conversation into fear.

The closing paragraphs list three smells that should trigger a review even if dashboards still load quickly today.

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