Snowflake Interview Questions and Answers - part II

                      This is the second part of the series of snowflake interview questions and answers. For the first part i.e Snowflake interview questions and answers - part I click here .

Q1. What are the types of data warehouses? What type of snowflake data warehouse is it? 

                       Before understanding the types of data warehouses, we need to know what is a data warehouse? A data warehouse is a central data repository used for data analyses and reporting .

                       Following are the types of data warehouses

                  a) Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) which is a centralized warehouse used for decision making across enterprises. EDW is used for tactical and strategic decision purposes.

                 b) Operational Data Store (ODS) which is a centralized database that is the complementary element to EDW and often acts as a source to EDW, ODS gets refreshed in real-time and used for operational reporting and decision making.

                 c) Data Mart is a subset of a data warehouse and is normally used by a specific team or business line.

                    Snowflake is an analytic data warehouse i.e can be used as Enterprise Data Warehouse and it is implemented as a software As A service i.e SaaS service.

Q2. Is it possible to use data from the local system to load in Snowflake?

                   No, we can not load from the local system we need to use Amazon S3 bucket or Microsoft Azure BLOB, or Google cloud storage.

Q3. What are the important features of Snowflake? 

                  The listed below are the features of the snowflake -

                1. Database and object closing

                2. External Table 

                3. Geospatial data support 

                4. XML support

               5. Cashing

               6. Search optimization services

               7. Integration with Hive meta store 

               8. Data protection and security 

               9. Time Travel

             10. Data sharing

Q4. Can we use an external database such as Oracle or  DB2 for Snowflake storage layer ?

                     No, we can not use an external database for snowflake storage layer snowflake comes with an inbuilt database which is built on SQL database. It is a columnar stored relational database. The snowflake database works well with Tableau, Extel, and many other tools. Snowflake database provides all the services which come with SQL database such as role-based security, query tool, multi-statement transactions, etc.

Q5. What are the cashing areas in snowflake architecture? 

                     The data fetched from the storage layer is cashed at two locations  1) Compute layer 2) Cloud services layer 

                     If cloud services layer cashing is disabled then compute layer cashing is used

                  

               Learn more about snowflake here