General Architecture

Question 1

Snowflake’s architecture is a hybrid of what two architectures

Answer 1

Traditional shared disk and share nothing database

Question 2

What does MPP stand for

Answer 2

Massively parallel processing

Question 3

How does snowflake process queries

Answer 3

With virtual warehouses. Each virtual warehouse uses mpp compute clusters where each node in the cluster stores a portion of the entire dataset locally

Question 4

What are the three key layers of Snowflake’s architecture

Answer 4

• Database Storage
• Query Processing
• Cloud Services

Question 5

How is data stored in cloud storage

Answer 5

A central data repo where data is internal optimized, compressed, and columnar format. Data is accessible by all compute nodes on the platform.

Question 6

Are data objects stored by Snowflake visible by the customer

Answer 6

The data objects stored by Snowflake are not directly visible nor accessible by customers; they are only accessible through SQL query operations run using Snowflake

Question 7

Each warehouse consists of what

Answer 7

It is a MPP compute cluster, composed of multiple compute nodes allocated by Snowflake from a cloud provider.

Question 8

What services are managed in the cloud services layer

Answer 8

AuthN
Infrastructure mgmt
Metadata mgmt
query parsing and optimizing
Access Control

Question 9

What ways can you connect to Snowflake

Answer 9

Web based user interface

Command Line Interface

ODBC and JDBC drivers that can be used by other applications

Native Connectors like python and spark

Third Party connectors that can connect apps like ETL tools and BI Tools

Question 10

Supported cloud platforms

Answer 10

Azure, AWS, GCP

Question 11

Differences in unit costs for credits and data storage are calculated by what on each cloud platform

Answer 11

Region

Question 12

Snowflake supports loading data from files staged in what location, regardless of the platform of the snowflake account

Answer 12

Internal snowflake stages
Amazon s3
Google Cloud Storage
Microsoft Azure blob storage

Question 13

Snowflake supports unloading data from files staged in what location, regardless of the platform of the snowflake account

Answer 13

Internal snowflake stages
Amazon s3
Google Cloud Storage
Microsoft Azure blob storage

Question 14

What type of loading does snowflake support

Answer 14

Bulk data loading and continuous data loading

Question 15

T/F Each virtual warehouse is independent and has no impact on other virtual warehouses

Answer 15

True

Question 16

You have create a table in snowflake as below

CREATE TABLE EMPLOYEE(EMPLOYEE_NAME STRING, SALARY NUMBER);

When you do a DESCRIBE TABLE EMPLOYEE, what will you see as the data type of EMPLOYEE_NAME?

Answer 16

VARCHAR(16777216)