Free SOL-C01 Snowflake Updates

Snowflake provides multipledate and time data typesto handle various temporal workloads. TheDATEtype stores only the calendar date (year, month, day), suitable for dimensional modeling, slowly changing dimensions, and calendar-related analytics.

TIMESTAMPrepresents a point in time and includes sub-second precision. Snowflake supports multiple variants:

TIMESTAMP_NTZ(no time zone)

TIMESTAMP_LTZ(local time zone)

TIMESTAMP_TZ(explicit time zone)

These options allow flexibility for global operations, event logs, and time-series analytics.

DATETIMEis an alias forTIMESTAMP_NTZ, meaning it stores both date and time but without time-zone awareness. It is commonly used in ETL, application logs, and system-generated events.

TIMEDATEis not a valid Snowflake data type and does not exist in Snowflake’s type system.

These temporal types support extensive built-in datetime functions, automatic casting, and integration with semi-structured data through VARIANT.

====================================================

Snowflake Data Exchange is not enabled by default. Accounts must open a support request to Snowflake Support, which then activates the feature. It cannot be enabled via UI or SQL. After activation, administrators may create private exchanges and listings.

====================================================

The correct SQL syntax to create a zero-copy clone of an existing table is:

CREATE TABLE MY_TABLE_CLONE CLONE MY_TABLE;

This command instantly creates a new table that references the same underlying micro-partitions as the original. Because of Snowflake’smetadata-only cloning, no storage is consumed at the time of creation. Storage only increases when either the original or the clone diverges through DML operations, following acopy-on-writemodel.

Cloning is available for multiple object types—tables, schemas, databases, stages, streams, tasks, and more. This capability enables rapid creation of development sandboxes, QA environments, rollback copies, or controlled experimentation without duplicating data.

Incorrect options:

“COPY TABLE” is not a valid Snowflake command.

BACKUP/RESTORE are not Snowflake SQL commands.

RESTORE applies only to Time Travel or Fail-safe, not to cloning.

Thus, the CLONE keyword is the only correct method for zero-copy duplication.

====================================================

The Cloud Services Layer is the coordination and control layer of Snowflake’s architecture. One of its primary responsibilities is managing security, metadata, authentication, and system-wide services. This layer handles user authentication, role-based access control, metadata services (such as table structures, micro-partition metadata, statistics), query parsing, optimization, execution coordination, and transaction management.

It does not store customer data; storage is handled by the Database Storage Layer using micro-partitions. It does not manage virtual warehouses directly; warehouses are part of the Compute Layer. While Snowsight is a UI that interacts with the Cloud Services Layer, the interface itself is not part of the architectural layer.

The Cloud Services Layer essentially acts as the “brain” of Snowflake, ensuring the platform is consistent, secure, optimized, and able to scale operations intelligently across compute clusters and cloud-native storage environments.

==================