Snowflake Interview Questions and Answers - Part I

                 This is the first article on a series of Interview Questions and their answers on Snowflake. Through these questions and answers we will learn more about Snowflake so let's start.

Q 1 . What is the architecture of Snowflake?

                  Snowflake architecture is a hybrid architecture of shard-disk and shared-nothing database architectures. As like shared-nothing architecture, snowflake processes queries using massively processing compute clusters where each node store some portion of data locally. on other hand, as like shard-disk architecture, snowflake uses a central repository for data & it is accessible from compute nodes.

                 Snowflake architecture has three layers i.e database storage to store data, Query processing or compute layer for processing queries and the third layer is cloud services which provide services such as security, metadata, and optimizer.

Q2. What are cloud platforms are supported by Snowflake?

                  Snowflake supports the following cloud platforms -

                 1. Amazon Web Services (AWS)

                 2. Google cloud platform (GCP)

                 3. Microsoft Azure ( Azure)

Q3. Do you consider snowflake as an ETL tool? 

                Yes, snowflake can be considered an ETL tool because it performs extract, transform, and loads operations like other ETL tools.

                a) Extract Process: With help of this process, snowflake extracts data from the source and creates data files. these data files support various data formats like CSV, XML, JSON, etc.

                b) Transform Process: We can write a custom transform process in snowflake to pull data from the source and apply some transformations for cleansing and standardization and then load the data.

               c) Load Process: With the load process, we can load data to the internal or external stage. we can use Microsoft  Azure Blob, Amazon S3 bucket or snowflake managed location for staging data. The data is copied to snowflake storage using the COPY INTO command.

Q4. What are the different Editions of Snowflake?

               Here is list of snowflake Editions 

             a) Standard Edition 

             b) Enterprise Edition 

             c) Business -critical Edition

             d) Virtual Private snowflake 

Q5. What kind of SQL does snowflake use?  

             Snowflake uses ANSI SQL which is a common standard version of SQL.

     

         

      

            

        Learn more about snowflake here