SnowPro-Core Reviews Questions

The statistics that can be used to identify queries with inefficient pruning are ‘Partitions scanned’ and ‘Partitions total’. These statistics indicate how much of the data was actually needed and scanned versus the total available, which can highlight inefficiencies in data pruning34.

The purpose of an External Function in Snowflake is to call code that executes outside of the Snowflake environment. This allows Snowflake to interact with external services and leverage functionalities that are not natively available within Snowflake, such as calling APIs or running custom code hosted on cloud services3.

 Snowflake is designed to optimize query performance by utilizing metadata for certain types of queries. When executing a COUNT query, Snowflake can often fulfill the request by accessing metadata about the table’s row count, rather than scanning the entire table or micro-partitions. This is particularly efficient for large tables like FCT_SALES with a significant number of records. The metadata layer maintains statistics about the table, including the row count, which enables Snowflake to quickly return the result of a COUNT query without the need to perform a full scan.

References:

• Snowflake Documentation on Metadata Management
• SnowPro® Core Certification Study Guide

 External stages can be altered and dropped in Snowflake. An external stage points to an external location, such as an S3 bucket, where data files are stored. Users can modify the stage’s definition or drop it entirely if it’s no longer needed. This is in contrast to table stages, which are tied to specific tables and cannot be altered or dropped independently.

References:

• [COF-C02] SnowPro Core Certification Exam Study Guide
• Snowflake Documentation on Stages1