Snowflake Interview Questions And Answers

Snowflake is one of the world’s leading data warehouse solutions with unique features. Snowflake is becoming the best cloud data warehouse solution with innovative features such as compute and storage isolation, data sharing, and data cleansing. Snowflake supports popular programming languages like Java, .Net Go language and Python language.

Choosing the right career opportunity in the proper organization is one of the crucial steps you need to take in this IT Competitive world. Here are Snowflake Interview Questions And Answers Prepared by Tutorial Mania, most often asked to help you find a job quickly.

Snowflake Interview Questions

  1.  What is Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse?
  2. What type of database is Snowflake?
  3. Is Snowflake an ETL tool? 
  4. What is Snowflake ETL?
  5. Is Snowflake SaaS or PAAS?
  6. How is Snowflake Different From AWS?
  7. What is Snowflake on AWS?
  8. Give a brief description of Snowflake software architecture?
  9. What role does the storage layer play in Snowflake?
  10. What is special about Snowflake?

Snowflake Interview Questions And Answers


1. What is Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse?
Answer: Snowflake’s data cloud is supplied by an advanced data platform provided as software-as-a-service (SaaS). Snowflake supports data storage, processing, and analytics solutions that are faster, easier to use, and more flexible than traditional products.

Snowflake data platforms are not built on existing database technologies or “big data” software platforms such as Hadoop. Instead, Snowflake combines a new SQL query engine with an innovative architecture designed for the cloud. Snowflake provides users with all the features of an enterprise analytics database and many additional special and unique features.

2.What type of database is Snowflake?
Answer: Snowflake is built into a complete SQL database. This is a relational database stored in columns and works well with many other tools that Tableau, Excel, and end-users know well.

3. Is Snowflake an ETL tool? 
Answer: Yes, Snowflake is an ETL tool. This is performed in three steps:

  1. Extracts data from the source and creates a data file. Data files support a variety of data formats, including JSON, CSV, and XML.
  2. Load data into an internal or external stage. Data can run on-premises at Microsoft Azure BLOB, Amazon S3 buckets, or snowflake host locations.
  3. The data is copied to the snowflake database table using the COPY in command.


4. What is Snowflake ETL?
Answer: Snowflake ETL means that the application of the ETL process loads data into the snowflake data warehouse. This configuration extracts the relevant data from the data source, performs the necessary transformations to prepare the data analysis, and loads it into Snowflake.

Q) Who can become a Snowflake professional?

The Snowflake tool is easy to learn and requires only basic knowledge of SQL. Following are the candidates who can start their career in Snowflake:

1. Data Engineers
2. Data Analysts
3. Data Scientists
4. Database Architects
5. IT professionals

Candidates who are willing to start their career in advanced cloud data warehouse tools.

You can check out our real-time Snowflake Training program to get ready for your next job!


5. Is Snowflake SaaS or PAAS?
Answer: Snowflake is a true SaaS offering.


6. How is Snowflake Different From AWS?
Answer: In Snowflake, the calculations and storage are completely independent, and the storage cost is the same as the data in S3 storage. AWS is trying to solve this problem by introducing a Red Shift spectrum that allows you to query data that exists directly in S3, but it’s not as seamless as Snowflake.


7. What is Snowflake on AWS?
Answer: Snowflake is a cloud data warehouse built on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure and is a true SaaS product. There is no hardware (virtual or physical) and software for selection, installation, configuration, or management. 

8. Give a brief description of Snowflake software architecture?
Answer:  Snowflake has a unique multi-cluster-based architecture with patented shared data created specifically for the cloud. The Snowflake architecture includes a storage computer and a service tier. They are logically integrated with each other and scaled to be independent of each other.

9. What role does the storage layer play in Snowflake? – Snowflake Interview Questions
Answer: The storage layer stores all the different data, tables, and query results in Snowflake. The storage tier is built on scalable cloud spot storage (storage systems that use AWS, GCP, or Azure). Storage tier design scales completely independent of computing resources, guaranteeing maximum scalability, resiliency, and performance for data storage and analytics.

10. What is special about Snowflake?
Answer: It covers a wide range of technical areas, including data integration, business intelligence, advanced analytics, and security and governance. Support for programming languages such as Go, Java, and more. Net, Python, C, node. Simplified data processing: Users can use mono language SQL to blend, analyze, and transform data for different types of data structures. Snowflake provides dynamic and scalable computing power using fees based purely on usage.

Snowflake Interview Questions And Answers For Beginners

11. What is Snowflake Architecture?
Answer: The Snowflake architecture is a hybrid of traditional shared disk and shared database architectures. Snowflake uses a central data repository that accesses persistent data from all compute nodes in the platform like the shared disk architecture.

12. Describe what type of database Snowflake is?
Answer: Snowflake is based entirely on the SQL database. A relational database system that stores data in columns and is compatible with other tools such as Excel and tableau. Snowflake supports multi-statement transactions and provides query tools that contain role-based security. These are some of the features that SQL databases typically need.

13. What does the Compute layer do in Snowflake?
Answer: All data processing tasks in Snowflake are performed by a virtual warehouse that is one or more compute resource clusters. When querying, the virtual warehouse retrieves from the storage tier the minimum data needed to fully complete the query request.

14. How does the calculation layer affect Snowflake? – Snowflake Interview Questions
Answer: All data processing tasks in Snowflake are performed by a virtual warehouse, which is a cluster of one or more compute resources. When you run a query, the virtual repository gets the minimum data needed from the storage tier to fully complete the query request.

15. Can AWS glue be connected to Snowflake?
Answer: Yes. AWS Glue provides a comprehensive hosting environment and, as a data warehouse service, makes it easy to connect with Snowflake. By combining these two solutions, you can process data in and transformation more easily and flexibly.

16. What does Snowflake caching mean? – Snowflake Interview Questions
Answer: Snowflake can cache the results of queries executed. Each time a new query is submitted, the previously executed query is checked. If a matching query exists, the results are cached. Then, use the cached result set instead of running the query again. Therefore, Snowflake is known as global snowflake capture because it can be used by any number of users in the world.

17. List the Features of Snowflake?
Answer: 

  1. Cloud services
  2. Database storage
  3. Performance and speed
  4. Compute layer
  5. Availability and security
  6. Seamless data sharing
  7. Storage & support for Semi-structured and structured data
  8. Data Sharing
  9. Concurrency and accessibility
  10. Result Caching
  11. External Tables
  12. Search Optimization Service
  13. Support for XML


18. What is Snowflake computing?
Answer: The Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse platform provides a core architecture that provides immediate, secure, managed access to the entire data network, as well as different types of data workloads, includes a single platform for developing modern data applications.

19. What is Schema in a Snowflake?
Answer: Schemas and database for organizing data stored in snowflakes. Display mode is a logical group of database objects, such as tables and views. The advantage of using snowflake programs is that they provide structured data and use small disk space.

20. What is Zero Copy in Snowflake? – Snowflake Interview Questions
Answer: Zero copy cloning is referred to simply as snowflake clone. The clone here is responsible for creating a copy of the database table or schema without having to copy the storage files available on the disk.


Real-Time Snowflake Interview Questions And Answers

21. What is Time Travel in Snowflake?
Answer: Time travel allows you to access your data at any point in the past. For example, if you have an employee table and you accidentally delete the table, you can use time travel to return 5 minutes and retrieve the data.

22. What is Failsafe in Snowflake?
Answer: Fail-safe provides a 7-day (non-configurable) period, and history data can only be recovered by snow flags. This time period starts immediately after the retention period of the time trip ends. Failure security is not provided as a means of accessing historical data after the time travel retention period ends.

23. What is a Snowflake Zero Copy Clone?
Answer: Clones (also known as ‘zero copy clones’) make copies of databases, patterns, or tables without repeating related storage files on disk.

24. Are there any associated costs with Snowflake time travel?
Answer: Yes, there is a storage charge for retaining historical data during time travel and breakdown security.

25. What are the cloud platforms supported by Snowflake? – Snowflake Interview Questions
Answer: 

  1. Microsoft Azure
  2. Google Cloud Platform
  3. Amazon Web Services


Frequently asked Snowflake Interview Questions and Answers

26. Where metadata is stored in snowflakes?
Answer: Snowflakes automatically generate metadata for internal or external stage files. It is stored in a virtual column and can be queried using the standard SELECT statement.

27. Does Snowflake index?
Answer: No, Snowflake doesn’t use indexes. This is one of the most appropriate zooms for any query.

28. Difference Between Time-Travel vs. Fail-Safe in Snowflake?
Answer: 

  1. Time Travel allows users to set and retrieve data back to history based on their snowflake version and object or account-specific time travel (day-data_retention_time_in_days settings.
  2. Fail-safe allows the user to control the retrieval of data applied only after the end of the time travel period. In this case, only Snowflake Support can be supported for seven days. Therefore, if the time movement is set to 6 days (assuming), you can retrieve DB objects that are longer than six days after the transaction is executed. Between 7 and 13 days, snowflake support after a transaction is executed can help you retrieve objects. The object cannot be removed or restored after 13 days.


29. What are the benefits of snowflake compression? – Snowflake Interview Questions
Answer: 

  1. Storage cost is lower than native cloud storage due to compression 
  2. No Storage Costs Disk cache
  3. Zero storage overhead for data cloning or data sharing


30. How many types of warehouses are there for snowflakes?
Answer: The Snowflake cloud architecture divides data warehouses into three distinct functions: compute resources (implemented as virtual warehouses), data storage, and cloud services. The cost of using Snowflake is based on the use of each function.

Snowflake Interview Questions And Answers For Experienced

31. Is it possible to store encrypted data in Snowflake?
Answer: The advantage of customer management keys is that you have complete control over the master keys for your critical management services: Control data with snowflakes. If you do not release this key, you will not be able to decrypt the data stored in your snowflake account.

32. What is Snowflake JavaScript?
Answer: Snowflake JavaScript UDF runs in a restricted engine, preventing system calls from the JavaScript context, such as accessing networks and disks and limiting the system resources available to the engine, especially memory.

33. How to make stored procedures in Snowflake?
Answer; the Stored procedure is created using the command and CREATE PROCEDURE command run with the call command. The stored program returns a single value. The SELECT statement can be executed in a stored program, but the results must be used by the stored program or narrowed down to a single value returned.

34. Is the snowflake OLAP or OLTP?
Answer: Snowflake is designed as an OLAP database system. Snowflake is characterized by storage and processing separation: storage is handled by Amazon S3.


35. Why is Snowflake so fast?
Answer: Snowflake compresses and stores data in blocks, unlike previous techniques for storing data in columns in succession. This makes query processing much faster than retrieving a line. It consists of multiple virtual repositories and is responsible for all query processing tasks.


36. What is the format data stored in the Snowflake?
Answer: Snowflake organizes data into multiple micro partitions and optimizes and compresses it internally. It is stored in columnar format. Data is stored in cloud storage and provides the simplicity of data management as a shared disk model.

37. How does Snowflake stored procedure executes?
Answer: In Object Explorer, just connect to an instance of the SQL Server database engine, extend the instance, and extend the database.

  1. Expand the required database, expand ‘programming,’ and then expand the stored procedure.
  2. Right-click a user-defined storage program, and then click Run Stored Program.
  3. In the Run Procedure(Execute Procedure) dialog box, specify whether to pass the values of each parameter and the null values.

Parameter: Specifies the Name of the Parameter.
Value: Specifies the value of Parameter, While calling Procedure.
Data Type: Specifies the Data Type of the Parameter.
Pass Null Value: This allows you to Pass a NULL as a parameter.
Output Parameter: Which specifies this is an Output parameter.

Snowflake Cloud Interview Questions

What is Snowflake?

38. How many nodes are there in a large snowflake warehouse?
Answer: A medium VWH has four nodes, while a large node has eight nodes. When you run a query on a cluster, the query is executed using the same number of knots (if available) as the parallel node.

39. Is Snowflake a data lake?
Answer: The Snowflake platform provides both the benefits of a data lake and the benefits of data warehouses and cloud storage. With Snowflake as a central data repository, organizations can achieve best-in-class performance, relational queries, security, and governance.

40. What makes Snowflake uniques? – Snowflake Interview Questions
Answer: Snowflake shapes evolve as they move through the air, so they never get the same. Even the two flakes floating side by side are blown through different levels of humidity and steam, creating a truly unique shape. With Snowflake, you can quickly clone tables, schemas, or databases to take up space. This is because the clone table actually creates pointers (pointing to stored data) that are not actual data. This means that the clone table contains only data that is different from the original table.

41. Give a short idea on Snowflake Cluster?
Answer: 
Data partitions that occur in Snowflake are called clustering. This usually specifies the grouping key for the table. The practice of managing cluster data that exists in a table is called reclustering.

42. Does Snowflake support unstructured data?
Answers: In addition to structured and semi-structured data, Snowflake announced support for unstructured data such as video, audio, imaging data, and PDF and the ability to coordinate data pipeline execution.


Conclusion:
We hope you enjoy reading these Snowflake Interview questions and answers. These are some of the common questions asked in snowflake interviews, and preparing these questions will help you get rid of snowflake interviews. We are continuing to add more Questions. Stay tuned to this blog for more interview questions.

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