- What it is. Studio is a specialized agent for cost and performance questions across your data stack. It answers on Snowflake, Databricks, dbt, Tableau and the other tools Altimate connects to. Ask in plain English and you get the cause and the fix, not the number on its own. Every figure in the answer links back to the table and the query behind it.
- Who it is for. Data platform leads, engineering managers and the finance partner who has to accept the number.
- What you get. You get one place to ask why the bill moved, which workload moved it, and what to change. This article follows one Snowflake cost question the whole way.
AI Cost Analysis on the Snowflake Page You Have Open
Studio is Altimate AI's specialized agent for your data stack. You ask in plain English about cost, performance and what to change. The answer spans Snowflake, Databricks, dbt, Tableau and more. Every major page in the Enterprise Platform has a chat button that opens it. This article stays on the Snowflake cost question, because that is where most teams start.
Open it from the cost Summary page and your cost breakdown stays on screen while you type. The questions Studio suggests there are all about spend:
- What drove this month's cost.
- Which five warehouses cost the most.
- What next quarter is projected to cost.
Studio already reads whatever Altimate is connected to. You add more context on top of that, in three forms:
- Attach a file.
- Pull in a Knowledge Base doc.
- Start from a prompt your team already saved.
Studio Answers Across Surfaces, Then Names the Cause and the Fix
Visibility is the first step, and only the first step. Studio reads every cost surface in one thread, so the answer does not stop at which number moved. It runs root cause analysis on that number, then gives you an optimization plan with the saving quantified. On Snowflake, these are the surfaces it draws from:
| Ask about | What the answer breaks down by |
|---|---|
| Warehouses | per-warehouse credits and query cost |
| AI Services | each function, split across four usage types: AI services, AI inference, and the overage version of each |
| Serverless | more than 19 serverless usage types, down to per-table clustering and dynamic-table refresh |
| Workloads | workload tag, matching the Workloads page |
Ask from a notebook page or a stored procedure page and Studio starts from that workload. You never have to name it in the question. Studio answers the same questions for Databricks, counted in DBUs instead of Snowflake credits.
Every Number in a Studio Answer Links to Its Source
A number nobody can trace is a number finance will not accept. Studio puts a small marker next to the numbers in an answer. Click a marker and you get three things:
- The table the number came from.
- The query that produced it.
- The steps it took to get from one to the other.
Read a missing marker as a signal. A sentence with no marker is Studio's own commentary. A number with a marker has a query behind it.
You can then share the answer or put it on a schedule:
- Share conversation. Makes a read-only link to the answer. You choose whether the link expires after 7, 30 or 90 days, or never.
- Schedule report. Re-runs the same conversation daily, weekly or monthly at 09:00 UTC, against fresh data each time.
What You Get Once Studio Is Switched On
- Answers in plain English. You ask about cost, performance or a slow workload, on the page you already have open.
- A source behind every number. Click the marker and you get the table, the query and the steps.
- A link the finance partner can open. It is read-only, and you decide when it expires.
- A report nobody has to rebuild. The same conversation re-runs on a schedule against fresh data.
Studio adds the markers in a separate step, after the answer is already written. The wording never changes to fit a citation. A marker points at exactly what Studio computed. If it cannot trace a number, that number gets no marker at all. That is why an unmarked figure is a real warning rather than a gap in the tooling.
Studio is in Beta today, and Altimate for Snowflake is where a Snowflake team starts.
