Vinay, a Data Engineer at GlobalMart, struggled with slow query performance on the daily sales dashboard. Assuming Snowflake optimized data automatically, he considered scaling up the warehouse but worried about costs. Then, his project manager suggested checking data clustering—something Vinay hadn’t explored. Seeking clarity, he turned to Rahul, the Senior Architect, who introduced him to natural clustering, micropartition pruning, and user-defined clustering keys, unlocking a powerful optimization strategy.