Snowflake Updated SOL-C01 Exam Questions and Answers by jeremiah

Snowflake provides a predefined set ofsystem-defined rolesthat enforce Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). These roles ensure structured governance and centralized privilege management across accounts. The primary system-defined roles include:

ACCOUNTADMIN, the highest-privileged role, responsible for global account-level activities such as billing, governance, replication, and cross-region/cloud configuration. It has implicit ownership of all objects.

SECURITYADMINmanages users, roles, MFA, and all privilege grants. This role ensures operational control over user lifecycle management while supporting separation of duties from ACCOUNTADMIN.

SYSADMINmanages objects such as databases, schemas, tables, warehouses, and other compute objects. It is the default role for data engineering and data platform teams needing full control of object creation and maintenance.

DATABASEADMINdoes not exist as a system-defined role—it is typically user-created for customization. System roles form a foundational security model for controlled privilege escalation and governance.

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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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Business Critical Edition includes advanced compliance certifications such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, HITRUST, and additional encryption and security controls.

Standard and Enterprise editions lack these compliance guarantees.

VPS provides even stronger isolation but builds on Business Critical features.

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The COMPLETE function enables natural language generation within Snowflake Cortex. It accepts a prompt and produces a text-based completion using an underlying large language model (LLM). COMPLETE can generate single-turn or multi-turn responses, depending on how the prompt is structured. It is used for tasks such as drafting summaries, generating recommendations, writing structured output such as JSON, or extending existing text. It is not a classification tool—that role is served by CLASSIFY_TEXT—and it does not perform linguistic translation (TRANSLATE) or document extraction (PARSE_DOCUMENT). COMPLETE allows developers and analysts to embed AI-driven generative capabilities directly within SQL pipelines or Snowpark processes, eliminating the need for external LLM services.

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