This talk presents recent research and development at Snowflake aimed at pushing the boundaries of database performance and functionality. In the first section, we will introduce a series of optimizations designed to accelerate query execution within Snowflake’s platform. We will discuss the technical challenges associated with developing general-purpose optimizations and balancing performance improvements across a wide range of workloads. The second section will explore a novel database constraint we’re developing to enable continuous processing applications. A finalization constraint restricts the regions of a database table which can be modified, permitting the specification of new query semantics within a rigorous, intuitive framework.