❄️ Snowflake Flashcards
❄️ What is Snowflake?
A cloud-native data platform for storage, processing, and analytics, built for performance and scalability.
🧊 What is the Snowflake architecture?
It uses a unique multi-cluster, shared data architecture separating storage, compute, and services.
📦 What are Warehouses in Snowflake?
Virtual compute engines that process queries and scale independently of storage.
🗃️ What is a Snowflake Database?
A container for schemas, tables, views, and other data objects inside Snowflake.
💾 What are Stages in Snowflake?
Temporary or permanent locations used to load/unload data from external storage like S3, GCS, etc.
📊 What is Time Travel?
Allows querying, restoring, or cloning historical data within a retention window (1 to 90 days).
🧠 What is Zero-Copy Cloning?
A feature that creates a copy of a table, schema, or DB instantly without duplicating storage.
📈 How does Scaling work?
Warehouses can scale vertically (size) or horizontally (multi-cluster) automatically or on demand.
🔒 What security features does Snowflake offer?
End-to-end encryption, RBAC, SSO, masking policies, and HIPAA/GDPR compliance.
🔗 Does Snowflake support semi-structured data?
Yes, using VARIANT data type for JSON, AVRO, XML, and querying with native SQL.
🔄 What is Data Sharing in Snowflake?
Allows secure, real-time data sharing across Snowflake accounts without copying data.
📡 What cloud providers does Snowflake support?
AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud – with seamless interoperability and cross-cloud capabilities.