Motivation | Suppose one wanted to execute two SQL queries against a Snowflake DB, ~20 minutes apart.
Optimization Problem | Which would cost fewer cloud services credits:
The documentation indicates that authentication incurs cloud services credit usage, but does not indicate whether idle connections incur credit usage.
Question | Does anyone know whether idle connections incur cloud services credit usage?
Snowflake connections are stateless. They do not occupy a resource, and they do not need to keep the TCP/IP connection alive like other database connections.
Therefore idle connections do not consume any the Cloud Services Layer credits unless you enable "CLIENT_SESSION_KEEP_ALIVE".
https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/parameters.html#client-session-keep-alive
When you set CLIENT_SESSION_KEEP_ALIVE, the client will update the token for the session (default value is 1 hour).
As Peter mentioned, the CSL usage up to 10% of daily warehouse usage is free, so refreshing the tokens will not cost you anything in practice.
About your approaches: I do not know how many queries you are planning to run daily, but creating a new connection for each query can be a performance killer. For costs perspective, idle connection will do max 24 authorization requests on a day, so if you are planning to run more than 24 queries on a day, I suggest you to pick the first approach.