# Default Snowflake Virtual Warehouse support: New in Tableau 2021.1

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2021-04-03
- **Format:** Video · 6 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data prep, Tool strategy
- **Tools:** Snowflake (connections, warehouses); Tableau (cloud)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/default-snowflake-virtual-warehouse-support-new-in-tableau-2021-1
- **Watch:** https://youtu.be/LJduRHh0VU4

I explore the new default Snowflake virtual warehouse support added in Tableau 2021.1, which means you no longer have to specify a warehouse when connecting to Snowflake. I demonstrate the connection in Tableau Online, then show how to find your default warehouse in Snowflake and explain the criteria Snowflake uses to pick one.

## Key takeaways

- From Tableau 2021.1, selecting a Snowflake warehouse at connection is optional - Tableau falls back to your default virtual warehouse if none is specified.
- You can connect to Snowflake directly from the browser in Tableau Online via the connectors option, with more connectors added in recent versions.
- To find which warehouse ran a query, use Snowflake's History tab; to check a user's default warehouse you need an account admin role under the Users tab.
- Snowflake decides the warehouse using a priority order: the user's default warehouse, then a client-specified default, then any warehouse set on the connection itself - so explicitly choosing one in Tableau overrides the default.
- Manually selecting a more powerful warehouse is still worthwhile for large, demanding workbooks that need extra compute.

## Chapters

- 0:00 What the new feature actually means
- 0:40 Connecting to Snowflake in Tableau Online
- 2:24 Finding which warehouse ran the query
- 3:21 How Snowflake decides the default warehouse
- 5:01 When to choose a warehouse manually

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/default-snowflake-virtual-warehouse-support-new-in-tableau-2021-1

---
just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena