ARA-C01 Exam Dumps : SnowPro Advanced: Architect Certification Exam

According to the Snowflake documentation, tasks are objects that enable scheduling and execution of SQL statements or JavaScript user-defined functions (UDFs) in Snowflake. Tasks can be used to automate data loading, transformation, and maintenance operations. Snowflake scripting is a feature that allows writing procedural logic using SQL statements and JavaScript UDFs. Snowflake scripting can be used to create complex workflows and orchestrate tasks. Therefore, the best option to automate the daily import of two files from an external stage into Snowflake, join and aggregate the data, and produce a final result set is to create a task using Snowflake scripting that will import the files using the COPY INTO command, and then call a UDF to perform the join and aggregation logic. The UDF can return a table or a variant value as the final result set. References:

Tasks

Snowflake Scripting

User-Defined Functions

 Partitioning an external table is a technique that improves the performance of queries executed against the table by reducing the amount of data scanned. Partitioning an external table involves creating one or more partition columns that define how the table is logically divided into subsets of data based on the values in those columns. The partition columns can be derived from the file metadata (such as file name, path, size, or modification time) or from the file content (such as a column value or a JSON attribute). Partitioning an external table allows the query optimizer to prune the files that do not match the query predicates, thus avoiding unnecessary data scanning and processing2

The other options are not effective steps for improving the performance of queries executed against an external table:

Shorten the names of the source files. This option does not have any impact on the query performance, as the file names are not used for query processing. The file names are only used for creating the external table and displaying the query results3

Convert the source files’ character encoding to UTF-8. This option does not affect the query performance, as Snowflake supports various character encodings for external table files, such as UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, ISO-8859-1, and Windows-1252. Snowflake automatically detects the character encoding of the files and converts them to UTF-8 internally for query processing4

Use an internal stage instead of an external stage to store the source files. This option is not applicable, as external tables can only reference files stored in external stages, such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage. Internal stages are used for loading data into internal tables, not external tables5 References:

1: SnowPro Advanced: Architect | Study Guide

2: Snowflake Documentation | Partitioning External Tables

3: Snowflake Documentation | Creating External Tables

4: Snowflake Documentation | Supported File Formats and Compression for Staged Data Files

5: Snowflake Documentation | Overview of Stages

 SnowPro Advanced: Architect | Study Guide

 Partitioning External Tables

 Creating External Tables

 Supported File Formats and Compression for Staged Data Files

 Overview of Stages

According to the Snowflake documentation, the following are some considerations for choosing clustering for a table1:

Clustering is optimal when either:

You require the fastest possible response times, regardless of cost.

Your improved query performance offsets the credits required to cluster and maintain the table.

Clustering is most effective when the clustering key is used in the following types of query predicates:

Filter predicates (e.g. WHERE clauses)

Join predicates (e.g. ON clauses)

Grouping predicates (e.g. GROUP BY clauses)

Sorting predicates (e.g. ORDER BY clauses)

Clustering is less effective when the clustering key is not used in any of the above query predicates, or when the clustering key is used in a predicate that requires a function or expression to be applied to the key (e.g. DATE_TRUNC, TO_CHAR, etc.).

For most tables, Snowflake recommends a maximum of 3 or 4 columns (or expressions) per key. Adding more than 3-4 columns tends to increase costs more than benefits.

Based on these considerations, the best option for the clustering key columns is C. C1, C3, C2, because:

These columns are heavily used in filter and join conditions of SELECT queries, which are the most effective types of predicates for clustering.

These columns have high cardinality, which means they have many distinct values and can help reduce the clustering skew and improve the compression ratio.

These columns are likely to be correlated with each other, which means they can help co-locate similar rows in the same micro-partitions and improve the scan efficiency.

These columns do not require any functions or expressions to be applied to them, which means they can be directly used in the predicates without affecting the clustering.

 1: Considerations for Choosing Clustering for a Table | Snowflake Documentation