Snowflake SOL-C01 - SnowPro Associate: Platform Certification Exam

USERADMIN is one of Snowflake’ssystem-defined roles, created automatically in every account. It is responsible for managing users and roles, including CREATE USER, ALTER USER, and role assignment. It is part of Snowflake’s default RBAC hierarchy (SYSADMIN, SECURITYADMIN, USERADMIN, etc.).

SNOWFLAKE_ADMIN and SNOWFLAKE_DBA are not Snowflake system roles—they may exist in organizations as custom roles but do not appear by default. DATA_ENGINEER is also user-created and not a built-in role.

Therefore, USERADMIN is the only true system-defined role listed.

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TheLISTcommand displays all files available in a stage—internal, external, user, or table stages.

It is typically used prior to COPY INTO to confirm which files are available for loading.

SHOW TABLES lists tables; SHOW GRANTS shows privileges; GRANTS queries show user-role assignments—not LIST.

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Snowflake Notebooks support both SQL and Python as executable cell types. This means that users can create notebook cells written in Python for programmatic data processing and modeling, and in SQL for declarative querying and transformation. Because of this, the statements “Notebook cells can be written in Python” and “Notebook cells can be written in SQL” are both correct.

Snowflake databases do not natively execute queries written in Scala; Scala is supported via Snowpark APIs for application code, not as a direct query language. Worksheets in Snowsight are primarily SQL-based and also support procedural constructs (e.g., Snowflake Scripting), so the phrase “only in SQL” is not a precise or complete characterization. Dashboards in Snowsight are created using SQL-backed visualizations and built-in UI components; JavaScript is not a supported authoring language inside the native dashboarding layer. Therefore, options B, D, and E are not correct in this context.

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Snowflake cloning is a metadata-only operation at creation. Both the clone and source share micro-partitions until changes occur (copy-on-write).

They are independent and do not auto-sync.

They can be made at the database, schema, or table level.

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Role hierarchy in Snowflake allows one role to inherit the privileges of another. By granting roles to other roles, Snowflake enables scalable, maintainable access control. Higher-level roles grant privileges downward, allowing administrators to create layered access structures. This hierarchy simplifies permission management across teams and environments. It has no relation to SQL sequencing, network settings, or data storage.

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A virtual warehouse in Snowflake is acompute resourcethat supplies CPU, memory, and temporary storage used to process SQL queries, perform data loading, execute DML operations, and run procedural logic. Warehouses are elastic, can be resized on demand, suspended to save costs, and automatically resumed when needed.

Virtual warehouses donotstore data—data is kept in Snowflake’s centralized storage layer. They also are not user accounts; user accounts belong to Snowflake’s identity management system. Worksheets are UI components in Snowsight or Classic Console used to write and run SQL, not compute resources.

Thus, virtual warehouses are Snowflake's compute engine, enabling all processing without managing physical infrastructure.

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TheCOMPLETEfunction is the only Cortex LLM function where the user can explicitly specify the model name (e.g., Mistral, Snowflake Arctic, Meta Llama models).

SUMMARIZE, SENTIMENT, and TRANSLATE are task-specific functions that use built-in, preselected models anddo not allowmodel selection.

The auto-suspend feature saves compute costs byautomatically suspending a warehouse when it becomes idlefor a configured period. Since Snowflake charges for compute time while a warehouse is running, auto-suspend prevents unnecessary credit consumption by stopping the warehouse when no queries are executing. The warehouse can resume automatically when a new query is submitted, provided auto-resume is enabled. Auto-suspend does not change warehouse size (scaling up/down) nor adjust clusters in a multi-cluster warehouse (scaling in/out). It strictly controls when compute resources turn off due to inactivity, making it an essential cost-optimization feature.

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A Snowflake database is a top-level container that can include schemas, and within those schemas it can contain objects such astables,views,stages,functions,procedures, anddatabase roles. However,global account-level roles(such as SYSADMIN, SECURITYADMIN, PUBLIC, or custom account roles) do not reside inside a database. These roles are created and managed at the Snowflake account level, not within any specific database. In contrast,database rolesare scoped within a specific database and can exist inside it. Views and tables are standard database objects. Therefore, the only option that a Snowflake database cannot contain is an account-levelRole.

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Internal stages are fullySnowflake-managed storage locationsused to temporarily store data files for loading or unloading operations. Examples include:

User stages (@~)

Table stages (@%table_name)

Named internal stages (@my_internal_stage)

Because they resideinside Snowflake, users do not need AWS, Azure, or GCP credentials to access them. Internal stages support all file types Snowflake can process, including CSV, JSON, Parquet, Avro, ORC, images, PDFs, and other semi-structured formats.

Incorrect statements:

They arenot limitedto structured or semi-structured data—they accept all supported formats.

External cloud credentials are only needed for external stages (S3, Blob, GCS).

Internal stages simplify secure data ingestion and operational pipelines because Snowflake handles encryption, metadata, and lifecycle management.

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