Snowflake Updated SnowPro-Core Exam Questions and Answers by viktor

 Snowflake supports several methods for authenticating users, including federated authentication, key-pair authentication, and OAuth. Federated authentication allows users to authenticate using their organization’s identity provider. Key-pair authentication uses a public-private key pair for secure login, and OAuth is an open standard for access delegation commonly used for token-based authentication. References: Authentication policies | Snowflake Documentation, Authenticating to the server | Snowflake Documentation, External API authentication and secrets | Snowflake Documentation.

The primary responsibility of Snowflake’s virtual warehouses is to execute queries. Virtual warehouses are one of the key components of Snowflake’s architecture, providing the compute power required to perform data processing tasks such as running SQL queries, performing joins, aggregations, and other data manipulations.

References:

• [COF-C02] SnowPro Core Certification Exam Study Guide
• Snowflake Documentation on Virtual Warehouses1

When a virtual warehouse in Snowflake is resized, specifically when it is increased in size, the additional compute resources become immediately available to all running and queued queries. This means that the performance of these queries can improve due to the increased resources. Conversely, when the size of a warehouse is reduced, the compute resources are not removed until they are no longer being used by any current operations1.

References:

• [COF-C02] SnowPro Core Certification Exam Study Guide
• Snowflake Documentation on Virtual Warehouses2

 External functions in Snowflake are a special type of User-Defined Function (UDF) that call code executed outside of Snowflake, typically through a remote service. Unlike traditional UDFs, external functions do not contain SQL code within Snowflake; instead, they interact with external services to process data2.

https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/external-functions.html#:~:text=External%20functions%20are%20user%2Ddefined,code%20running%20outside%20of%20Snowflake .