Differences in SQL

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How does Snowflake compare to Microsoft's T-SQL for SQL Server? Part two of a five-part series of blogs
All dialects of SQL are similar, you'd think, but the different ethos and editing environment of Snowflake versus SQL Server make the switch surprisingly difficult, as this blog explains. How does Snowflake compare to Microsoft's T-SQL for SQL Server? Differences in SQL (this blog) You write Snowflake in a very different environment Relationships and primary keys don't exist in Snowflake Some SQL programming differences

How does Snowflake compare to Microsoft's T-SQL for SQL Server?

Part two of a five-part series of blogs

All dialects of SQL are similar, you'd think, but the different ethos and editing environment of Snowflake versus SQL Server make the switch surprisingly difficult, as this blog explains.

How does Snowflake compare to Microsoft's T-SQL for SQL Server?
Differences in SQL (this blog)
You write Snowflake in a very different environment
Relationships and primary keys don't exist in Snowflake
Some SQL programming differences

Posted by Andy Brown on 28 January 2026

In this blog

Semi-colon line endings
The syntax of aliases
String concatentation
Different functions
Showing the first N rows
Snowflake casting
Snowflake ILIKE operator

Here are some of the main dialects of SQL:

Dialect	Use
Transact SQL or T-SQL	Used within Microsoft's SQL Server and Azure
Snowflake SQL	Used, not surprisingly, for interrogating Snowflake databases
Postgres SQL	Used, equally unsurprisingly, for interrogating Postgres databases
PL/SQL	Oracle's version of SQL
MySQL	An open-source version of SQL
ANSI SQL	The standard specification of SQL from which all of the dialects derive

This page compares the first two dialects: Microsoft's T-SQL and Snowflake SQL. The examples are based on a (very) simple database containing two tables:

The first table contains authors, the second one books they've written (even though it's a tiny database, there's something for everyone to read).

The differences shown below aren't a complete list, but for day-to-day programmers writing SELECT statements they are the ones that people are by far the most likely to come across.

Semi-colon line endings

Although Microsoft have said that they may at some point enforce semi-colons at the end of commands, I've never used them. However, Snowflake does:

This gives a Snowflake compilation error, as the commands don't end in semi-colons.

The syntax of aliases

There are two big differences with Snowflake column aliases, as shown by this example:

This would fail for two reasons.

The differences are:

Difference	Notes
You can't use square brackets	The reference to [Last name] above wouldn't compile
Names in quotes are case-sensitive	The First name field is referenced in the ORDER BY clause as first name, which won't be found

String concatentation

Compare this T-SQL query:

SELECT

-- join each author's first and last name

a.FirstName + ' ' + a.LastName AS Author,

b.Title

FROM

Author AS a

JOIN Book AS b ON a.AuthorId = b.BookId

With this Snowflake one:

SELECT

-- join each author's first and last name

a.FirstName || ' ' || a.LastName AS Author,

b.Title

FROM

Author AS a

JOIN Book AS b ON a.AuthorId = b.BookId

What this shows is that Snowflake uses || instead of + for string concatenation.

Different functions

Here are some differences in the use of functions between the two SQL dialects:

Area	T-SQL example	Snowflake SQL
Trapping nulls	IsNull( Title, 'No title given')	IsNull( Title, 'No title given')
Getting today's date	GetDate() Current_Date (new)	Current_Date()
Getting today's time	Current_Timestamp	Current_Timestamp()

Showing the first N rows

This is one of the biggest differences in syntax - T-SQL uses TOP 10, whereas Snowflake SQL uses LIMIT. Compare this Transact SQL query:

-- show the first 2 books

SELECT TOP 2

b.*

FROM

Book AS b

ORDER BY

b.Title

With its Snowflake equivalent:

SELECT

a.AuthorId, a.FirstName, a.LastName

FROM Author a

ORDER BY a.AuthorId

LIMIT 10;

Snowflake casting

Although there is a CAST function in Snowflake, it's more common to use the :: operator. For example:

-- cast BookId to NUMBER and Title to VARCHAR with a fixed length

SELECT

b.BookId::NUMBER(38,0),

b.Title::VARCHAR(100)

FROM Book AS b;

Snowflake ILIKE operator

The case-sensitivity of T-SQL queries depends on the default database collation used. Snowflake makes things simpler by having two wildcard matching keywords, like and ilike. For example this query would return Riders, even though it doesn't start with an upper-case R:

SELECT

b.Title

FROM

Book AS b

where b.Title ilike 'r%';

Parts of this blog
How does Snowflake compare to Microsoft's T-SQL for SQL Server? Differences in SQL (this blog) You write Snowflake in a very different environment Relationships and primary keys don't exist in Snowflake Some SQL programming differences

Some other pages relevant to these blogs include:

Classes in Snowflake

You can also book hourly online consultancy for your time zone with one of our 7 expert trainers!

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Semi-colon line endings

The syntax of aliases

String concatentation

Different functions

Showing the first N rows

Snowflake casting

Snowflake ILIKE operator

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