By default, the standard retention period for Time Travel in Snowflake is 1 day across all Snowflake accounts. Time Travel enables users to access historical data within this retention window, allowing for point-in-time data analysis and recovery. This feature is a significant aspect of Snowflake's data management capabilities, offering flexibility in handling data changes and accidental deletions.
Reference:
Snowflake Documentation: Using Time Travel

By default, the Snowflake role required to create a share is ACCOUNTADMIN (D). This role has the necessary privileges to perform administrative tasks, including creating shares for data sharing purposes

Two key metrics in Snowflake's Query Profile that provide insights for performance improvement are:
* Remote Disk IO: This measures the time the query spends waiting on remote disk access, indicating potential performance issues related to I/O bottlenecks.
* Pruning: This metric reflects how effectively Snowflake's micro-partition pruning is reducing the data scanned. Better pruning (more partitions excluded) leads to faster query performance, as fewer micro- partitions need to be processed.
These metrics are essential for identifying and addressing inefficiencies in data retrieval and storage access, optimizing overall query performance.

The SnowSQL file that can store connection information is named 'config'. It is used to store user credentials and connection details for easy access to Snowflake instances. References: Based on general database knowledge as of 2021.