Featues And Architecture

Question 1

What is the purpose of the cloud native data platform offered as a service?

Answer 1

Purpose built for Cloud

Question 2

Which cloud providers does the infrastructure run on?

Answer 2

AWS, GCP, Azure

Question 3

What characteristics of the cloud does the data platform utilize?

Answer 3

• Elasticity
• Scalability
• High availability
• Cost-efficiency
• Durability

Question 4

What are the main features of a data warehouse?

Answer 4

• Structured & relational data
• ANSI Standard SQL
• ACID compliant Transactions
• Data stored in dbs, schemas & tables

Question 5

What is a data lake?

Answer 5

Scalable storage & compute where schema doesn’t need to be defined upfront

Question 6

What are the features of data engineering in the platform?

Answer 6

• COPY INTO
• Snowpipe
• Separate compute clusters
• Tasks and Streams

Question 7

How is data secured in the platform?

Answer 7

All data is encrypted at rest and in transit

Question 8

What does data science in the platform aim to achieve?

Answer 8

Remove data management roadblocks with centralized storage

Question 9

What are the components of the Snowflake partner ecosystem?

Answer 9

• Data Sharing
• Data Marketplace
• Data Exchange
• BI tools

Question 10

What are the benefits of using Software as a Service (SaaS) in this platform?

Answer 10

• No management of hardware
• Transparent updates and patches
• Subscription payment mode
• Ease of access through cloud UI
• Automatic optimization

Question 11

What are the two traditional distributed architecture options mentioned?

Answer 11

• Shared-Disk
• Shared Nothing

Question 12

What is the advantage of the Shared-Disk architecture?

Answer 12

Simple to manage and single source of truth

Question 13

What is a disadvantage of the Shared-Disk architecture?

Answer 13

Single point of failure and limited scalability

Question 14

What is an advantage of the Shared Nothing architecture?

Answer 14

• Co-locating compute & storage avoids network latency
• Generally cheaper
• Improved scaling

Question 15

What is a disadvantage of the Shared Nothing architecture?

Answer 15

• Scaling still limited
• Storage and compute tightly coupled
• Tendency to overprovision

Question 16

What is the focus of the Snowflake Multi-Cluster Data Architecture?

Answer 16

Snowflake is built specifically for Cloud

Question 17

What are the three scalable layers of Snowflake’s architecture?

Answer 17

• Cloud Services Layer
• Query Processing Layer
• Data Storage Layer

Question 18

What does the Cloud Services Layer handle?

Answer 18

• Authentication
• Managing cloud infrastructure
• Query optimization
• Security
• Metadata

Question 19

What is the role of the Query Processing Layer?

Answer 19

Manage compute to process queries using separate compute clusters called virtual warehouses

Question 20

What is a virtual warehouse in Snowflake?

Answer 20

Named abstraction for a cluster of cloud-based compute instances

Question 21

How does the Data Storage Layer organize data?

Answer 21

Stores table data organized into databases

Question 22

What is a micro-partition?

Answer 22

Data loaded or inserted into partitions optimized for query results

Question 23

What is the billing model for Snowflake?

Answer 23

Flat rate by TB calculated monthly

Question 24

What is the default encryption used for data?

Answer 24

AES256 strong encryption

Question 25

What is the purpose of User Defined Functions (UDFs)?

Answer 25

Allow users to write their own functions in various programming languages

Question 26

What types of objects are included in the Snowflake Object Model?

Answer 26

* Database * Schema * Table * View * Stage * Pipe * Procedure * Function * Task * Stream

Question 27

What is the difference between a permanent table and a temporary table?

Answer 27

Permanent tables are default, while temporary tables persist only for the session

Question 28

What is a materialized view?

Answer 28

Stores results of a query definition and periodically refreshes it

Question 29

What are tasks in Snowflake?

Answer 29

Objects used to schedule execution of SQL or stored procedures

Question 30

What is a stream in Snowflake?

Answer 30

Schema level object to view and track DML changes to source tables

Question 31

What are the two billing plans available in Snowflake?

Answer 31

* On Demand * Capacity

Question 32

What is SnowSQL?

Answer 32

Allows running commands outside the UI

Question 33

What is Snowpark?

Answer 33

An API accessed outside of Snowflake supporting Java, Scala, and Python

Question 34

What is the maximum number of child tasks in a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)?

Answer 34

1000 child tasks max

Question 35

What is Snowflake Scripting?

Answer 35

Extension to Snowflake SQL

Question 36

What can be written using Snowflake Scripting?

Answer 36

Stored procedures and procedural code outside of stored procedures

Question 37

Where can variables be used in Snowflake Scripting?

Answer 37

Only within block

Question 38

How can variables be assigned in Snowflake Scripting?

Answer 38

Using LET keyword in the BEGIN

Question 39

What are the looping constructs available in Snowflake Scripting?

Answer 39

For Loop and Cursor loops over records in table

Question 40

What is RESULTSET in Snowflake Scripting?

Answer 40

Executed when assigned

Question 41

What is Snowpark?

Answer 41

An API accessed outside of the Snowflake

Question 42

Which programming languages does Snowpark support?

Answer 42

* Java * Scala * Python

Question 43

What type of abstraction does Snowpark provide?

Answer 43

In a dataframe

Question 44

What is the execution model of Snowpark?

Answer 44

Executions are lazy

Question 45

What model does Snowpark work on?

Answer 45

Push out model

Question 46

Why do developers prefer using Snowpark?

Answer 46

So developers can use Snowflake in preferred language