SnowFlake SnowPro Advanced Data Engineer DEA-C02 Free Sample Questions

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SnowPro-Advanced-Data-Engineer Sample Questions

  1. Question 1

    A financial services company is implementing a near real-time fraud detection pipeline. Transaction data arrives via a Kafka topic. The data engineering team must choose between Snowpipe and Snowpipe Streaming for ingestion. A key requirement is to minimize ingestion latency to under 5 seconds per batch of records. Which factor is the MOST critical in deciding to use Snowpipe Streaming over the traditional Snowpipe REST API?

    Answer and explanation

    Correct answer: C

    Snowpipe Streaming is designed for ultra-low latency by writing rows directly to Snowflake tables without first staging them as files in cloud storage. This direct ingestion method is the key architectural difference that allows it to meet sub-second latency requirements, making it the superior choice over traditional Snowpipe for this use case.

  2. Question 2

    A data science team is developing a sentiment analysis model using a custom Python library packaged as a .whl file. This library is not available on Anaconda or PyPI. A data engineer needs to make this library available to a Snowpark Python UDF for batch scoring. The security policy prohibits direct runtime package installation from public repositories. What is the recommended approach to securely deploy and use this custom library?

    Answer and explanation

    Correct answer: B

    The correct and most efficient method for using custom, non-public Python libraries is to upload the packaged wheel (.whl) or zip file to a Snowflake stage. Then, during UDF creation, you specify the path to this file in the IMPORTS clause. Snowflake will automatically distribute and unpack the library in the secure sandbox environment where the UDF executes.

  3. Question 3

    A data engineer is analyzing the query profile of a long-running query that joins a large fact table (TRANSACTIONS, 5TB) with several small dimension tables. The profile indicates significant remote disk I/O (65% of execution time) and poor partition pruning (90% of partitions scanned). The TRANSACTIONS table is clustered by TRANSACTION_DATE. The problematic query filters on CUSTOMER_ID. Which action would provide the MOST significant and targeted performance improvement for this specific query?

    Answer and explanation

    Correct answer: D

    The query profile indicates poor pruning on a non-clustering key column (CUSTOMER_ID). The Search Optimization Service is specifically designed to improve the performance of selective point-lookup queries on high-cardinality columns that are not part of the clustering key. It creates a persistent data structure to accelerate these lookups, directly addressing the root cause of the poor pruning and remote I/O.

  4. Question 4

    A data engineer has created a stream object on a RAW_EVENTS table to capture changes for an ELT pipeline. The stream is consumed by a task that runs every 5 minutes. The task failed to run for 3 hours due to a permission issue, which has now been resolved. The RAW_EVENTS table has a data retention period of 1 day. What will be the state of the stream when the task runs successfully for the first time after the outage?

    Answer and explanation

    Correct answer: C

    A stream maintains its own offset and tracks all changes since it was last consumed. As long as the change data is still within the source table's Time Travel retention period (1 day in this case), the stream will not lose data. When the consuming task finally runs, it will read all accumulated changes from the stream since its last successful consumption, which includes the entire 3-hour period.

  5. Question 5

    Multiple answers

    A data architect needs to enforce column-level security on a table containing employee data, including PII like SALARY and SSN. The requirements are:

    1. Analysts in the HR_ANALYST role should see the full, unmasked data.
    2. All other roles, including ACCOUNTADMIN, should see masked values (e.g., 'XXX-XX-XXXX' for SSN).

    Which combination of objects and privileges is required to correctly implement this? (Select TWO)

    Answer and explanation

    Correct answers: A, C

  6. Question 6

    True or False: When a stored procedure written in Python (using Snowpark) is called, it executes with the rights of the caller (invoker's rights), not the rights of the procedure's owner (owner's rights).

    Answer and explanation

    Correct answer: B

    By default, stored procedures execute with owner's rights. This allows developers to create procedures that can perform actions on database objects that the calling user does not have direct privileges to access. While you can explicitly create a procedure to run with caller's rights, the default behavior is owner's rights.

  7. Question 7

    Multiple answers

    A data engineer needs to call an external machine learning model hosted on a cloud provider's serverless function endpoint to enrich data within a Snowflake query. The endpoint requires an API key for authentication. What Snowflake objects must be configured to enable this workflow securely? (Select THREE)

    Answer and explanation

    Correct answers: A, B, D

  8. Question 8

    An IoT company ingests billions of small JSON events daily into an external S3 stage. The data needs to be loaded into a RAW_EVENTS table. A data engineer implemented a Snowpipe with auto-ingest, but the ingestion credits are significantly higher than expected. Upon investigation, the engineer finds that files are being created in S3 every few seconds, and most are under 1 MB. What is the MOST effective strategy to reduce Snowpipe costs while maintaining the continuous ingestion flow?

    Answer and explanation

    Correct answer: B

    Snowpipe costs are influenced by the overhead of managing file loading events. Ingesting numerous small files is inefficient and costly. The best practice is to aggregate small files into larger chunks (ideally 100-250MB compressed) before ingestion. This reduces the number of notifications and file processing events, significantly lowering the per-byte ingestion cost and optimizing resource usage.

  9. Question 9

    A data engineer is designing a development workflow. The PROD database is 10TB. The team needs a full, isolated copy of the PROD database for development (DEV) and another for QA (QA). A key requirement is to minimize storage costs. Additionally, the DEV database must not have a Fail-safe period. Which set of commands achieves these requirements MOST efficiently?

    Answer and explanation

    Correct answer: B

    Zero-copy cloning is the most storage-efficient way to create copies of a database. It only stores the metadata and any new or changed data (delta). To meet the requirement of no Fail-safe for the DEV database, it should be created as a TRANSIENT database. A standard clone for QA maintains the same data protection features as PROD. This combination perfectly meets all requirements.

  10. Question 10

    A data engineer needs to flatten a deeply nested JSON structure stored in a VARIANT column named EVENT_DATA. The structure contains an array of transactions, and each transaction has an array of items. The goal is to produce a flat table with event_id, transaction_id, and item_id. Which SQL construct is essential for achieving this transformation efficiently in Snowflake?

    Answer and explanation

    Correct answer: C

    The LATERAL FLATTEN construct is Snowflake's primary tool for un-nesting semi-structured data arrays. To flatten a nested structure (an array within an array), you must chain multiple LATERAL FLATTEN clauses. The first FLATTEN would expand the transactions array, and the second FLATTEN would operate on the output of the first to expand the items array within each transaction.

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