The EXPLAIN command returns the logical execution plan for a query, which shows the upper bound estimates for the number of partitions and bytes that might be scanned by the query1. However, these estimates do not account for the runtime optimizations that Snowflake performs to improve the query performance and reduce the resource consumption2. One of these optimizations is join pruning, which eliminates unnecessary partitions from the join inputs based on the join predicates2. This can result in fewer partitions and bytes scanned than the estimates from the EXPLAIN output3. Therefore, the actual partitions scanned value in the Query Profile can be lower than the partitionsAssigned value in the EXPLAIN output4.