# SQL Warehouse Auto-Stop Disabled/Excessive

> Auto-stop set to 0 minutes on a classic SQL warehouse means the full cluster rate bills through every idle gap between queries. ZopNight attaches a dollar figure only when a measured idle percentage exists for that specific warehouse; serverless warehouses draw a softer, low-severity nudge since they suspend natively.

Source: https://zop.dev/integrations/databricks/recommendations/sql-warehouse-auto-stop-disabled-excessive
Updated: 2026-08-19

---

## Idle billing is the classic warehouse's failure mode

A classic or PRO SQL warehouse is a cluster that stays up between queries, and it
bills at its full rate while waiting. Auto-stop is the entire cost model: with it, a
quiet afternoon costs minutes of compute; without it, the warehouse bills the whole
afternoon, the night, and the weekend. The rule's detection line for classic
warehouses is auto-stop disabled entirely (the `auto_stop_mins` field at 0) or set
above the 60-minute ceiling that separates a deliberate idle window from an
effectively unbounded one.

## Serverless gets a different yardstick

Serverless SQL warehouses suspend natively and bill per second of activity, so a
generous auto-stop value is not the exposure it is on classic compute. ZopNight
therefore suppresses the excessive-value branch entirely for serverless and flags
only the fully disabled case, at low severity: a nudge that keeping a warm endpoint
costs something, not an alarm. A warehouse whose serverless flag is absent from older
inventory is treated as classic, the safe default.

## Where the dollar figure comes from, and when it will not

A cost finding here carries real money only when two inputs exist for the specific
warehouse: its priced monthly cost, and a measured idle percentage derived from usage
heatmaps. The savings claim is cost times measured idle share, and it is only made
for the auto-stop-disabled case, where the whole idle window genuinely bills. For an
enabled-but-excessive setting the existing auto-stop already reclaims the long gaps,
so that formula would double-count, so the rule abstains on that branch rather than
over-claim. One more honesty note: the per-warehouse idle series is not yet produced
by the aggregator, so in practice today the rule detects the configuration gap but
abstains from dollar claims until that producer lands.

## Find the disabled warehouses

```bash
databricks api get /api/2.0/sql/warehouses | jq '
  .warehouses[]
  | select(.auto_stop_mins == 0)
  | {name, size, enable_serverless_compute}'
```

## Setting a window that fits the workload

Sixty minutes is the ceiling, not the target. BI warehouses serving business-hours
dashboards do well at 15 to 30 minutes; dev and ad-hoc warehouses at 10. The restart
cost is a short warm-up on the next query; weigh it once, then let auto-stop do the
arithmetic every idle evening after.