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.