Snowflake SOL-C01 - SnowPro Associate: Platform Certification Exam

Snowflake usesrole-based access control (RBAC), where privileges are assigned to roles rather than individual users. All of the listed privileges (SELECT, INSERT, MONITOR) can be granted to a role.

SELECTallows reading data from tables, views, or materialized views.

INSERTallows adding new rows into a table.

MONITORallows viewing query history, warehouse status, and resource usage.

In addition, roles can receive privileges such as CREATE TABLE, USAGE, MODIFY, OPERATE, OWNERSHIP, and many others. Users inherit all privileges assigned to the roles they possess, enabling scalable security design.

Thus, all listed privileges can be granted to Snowflake roles.

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Auto-scale enables Snowflake to dynamically start or stop clusters in a multi-cluster warehouse depending on workload pressure. When concurrency rises, Snowflake adds clusters; when demand decreases, it scales back down. This provides seamless performance during peak workloads and efficient resource usage during off-peak times. Auto-scale does not require manual action—it is fully automated once configured. It is not limited to standard warehouses; multi-cluster mode is available in Enterprise Edition and above. Ultimately, auto-scale ensures elasticity and cost-efficient compute allocation.

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Snowflake is best described as anAI Data Cloud Platform. While Snowflake originated as a cloud data warehouse, its capabilities have expanded to include secure data sharing, application development, machine learning workloads, unstructured data processing, Snowpark, and integrated LLM/AI functions (such as Snowflake Cortex and Streamlit). This broad ecosystem supports analytic workloads, governance, multi-cloud architecture, and AI-driven applications. It is not simply an ETL tool or a transactional database.

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Aschemain Snowflake is a logical container inside a database that groups related objects. It can containtables,views,stages,file formats,sequences,streams,tasks, and other database objects. Schemas allow structured organization, privilege management, and separation of workloads.

Tablesstore structured data.

Viewsare virtual tables defined by queries on other objects.

Stagesstore data files for loading/unloading.

Virtual warehouses are compute resources, not database objects, and therefore exist outside schemas. Warehouses belong to the account-level namespace and are managed independently of databases and schemas.

Schemas play a key role in RBAC and object naming through fully qualified names: database.schema.object.

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