What is the size limit imposed by VARIANT data type? 16MB compressed or 16MB uncompressed?
There are two places in the documentation which are conflicting. Which is correct ? 
VARIANT data type size limit
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2 Answers
AFTER The VARIANT data type imposes a 16 MB (compressed) size limit on individual rows. https://docs.snowflake.net/manuals/user-guide/semistructured-considerations.html
This is one of the most common misunderstandings about variant columns ( thanks to the repeating error in the docs). A VARIANT can store values to a maximum size of 16 MB uncompressed.
https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/data-types-semistructured.html#variant
The above page is updated recently, and you can see that the older version had the same error:
The limitation comes from a 16 MB limit on "internal" in-memory representation, which is uncompressed. I will report the one which is misleading:
https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/semistructured-considerations.html
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