DEA-C02 Data Movement Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  A scheduled task that runs COPY INTO every five minutes against the S3 stage

  Why it's wrong here

  A scheduled task does reuse COPY INTO logic, but a fixed five-minute interval is not near real-time and still relies on a user-managed warehouse for execution. It also requires handling duplicate prevention manually and does not react to file arrival events, so it adds administrative overhead compared with an event-driven ingestion service.

• ✗

  An external table defined over the S3 stage with automatic refresh enabled

  Why it's wrong here

  External tables expose file contents as a read-only table and refresh metadata, but they do not insert rows into a target table and cannot run COPY transformation logic such as column reordering or error handling. The requirement is to load data into a table continuously, so an external table would require an additional scheduled INSERT ... SELECT, adding overhead and latency.

• ✗

  A materialized view created over an external table pointing at the S3 stage

  Why it's wrong here

  Materialized views cannot be defined on external tables, and they are designed to accelerate repeated queries over base tables rather than to ingest files. Even if supported, they would not provide file-arrival-driven loading into a target table, so this approach does not satisfy the continuous ingestion requirement.

• ✓

  A Snowpipe configured with COPY INTO from the S3 stage

  Why this is correct

  Snowpipe loads files automatically as they arrive by executing a COPY INTO statement that can include transformations, column mappings, and error handling. It uses event notifications plus a queue with serverless compute, so no warehouse management is required. This matches the need for automatic, near real-time ingestion with minimal administrative overhead.