This course covers practice questions related to features of Snowflake along with architectural principles and best practices for implementing Snowflake solutions. An ideal exam candidate must have a thorough understanding of the following Snowflake aspects:

• Loading and transforming data in Snowflake

• Scaling and optimizing virtual warehouses in Snowflake

• Data sharing in Snowflake

• DDL & DML query operations

• Snowflake accounts management

• Handling unstructured & semi-structured data

• Continuous data protection methods in Snowflake

1. Account and Security (10 – 15%)

Candidates will be evaluated on their knowledge of Snowflake accounts and security, including:

• Snowflake accounts and usage monitoring

• Security principles and policies like Multi-factor Authentication (MFA), Single Sign-On (SSO), data encryption, access control, and federated authentication

• Snowflake roles and entities including Role Hierarchy and Privilege Inheritance

• Snowflake Data Governance and security features like data masking and External Tokenization

2. Virtual Warehouses (15 – 20%)

Virtual warehouse is an important Snowflake capability that allows data manipulation using SQL. Using Snowflake, candidates must learn how virtual warehouses provision compute, memory, and storage resources. Recommended topics also include:

• Learning about compute principles like credit usage, billing, concurrency, and caching

• Understanding virtual warehouse best practices for monitoring, management, and scaling

3. Data Movement (11 – 20%)

Data lies at the heart of Snowflake. Candidates will be evaluated on their abilities to manipulate data, including:

• Differentiation between data loading commands like COPY, INSERT, PUT, GET, and VALIDATE

• Defining bulk vs. continuous data loading methods like COPY and Snowpipe

• Data loading best practices for file size and folders

• Best practices and formats for unloading data from Snowflake to local storage or cloud storage

• Manipulating semi-structured data

4. Performance Management (5 – 10%)

Candidates must be aware of the best practices for Snowflake performance management on storage and virtual warehouses. Important topics for this section are:

• Best practices for clustering, materialized views, and search optimization on storage

• Best practices for query performance and analysis, query profiles, query history, SQL optimization, and caching on virtual warehouses

5. Snowflake Overview and Architecture (25 – 30%)

To pass the SnowPro Core exam, candidates must focus on mastering the Snowflake architecture, accounting for a significant portion of the exam. It outlines major Snowflake components and capabilities, including:

• Snowflake’s cloud data platform

• Data marketplace and web interface (UI)

• Snowflake’s data sharing functionalities

• Snowflake versus legacy warehouse solutions

• Features of different Snowflake editions

• Snowflake’s Partner Ecosystem including cloud partners and connectors

• Snowflake’s three distinct layers, i.e., storage layer, compute layer, and cloud services layer

• Snowflake’s catalog and objects including database, schema, tables types, view types, data types, and external functions

6. Storage and Protection (10 – 15%)

This section revolves around Snowflake’s storage and data protection concepts. Candidates must learn the following topics to ace the related SnowPro Core questions:

• Snowflake’s storage concepts like micro partitions, metadata types, clustering, data storage, stage types, file formats, and storage monitoring

• Continuous data protection including time travel, fail safe, data encryption, and cloning