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.

• ✗

  Using a Task to run a COPY INTO statement every 5 minutes on a Small warehouse.

  Why it's wrong here

  Manual COPY INTO commands require an active virtual warehouse, which incurs minimum billing increments even for small files. When files arrive sporadically throughout the day, keeping a warehouse running or frequently starting it up leads to significant cost inefficiencies compared to the serverless per-second billing model used by the Snowpipe service.

• ✗

  Executing a COPY INTO command via a Python script triggered by a cron job.

  Why it's wrong here

  Cron-based scripts introduce external dependencies and require infrastructure to host the script. This method does not scale as well as native Snowflake features and often results in higher latency or unnecessary warehouse uptime if the job runs when no new data is present in the S3 bucket's external stage.

• ✓

  Configuring Snowpipe with auto-ingest enabled using SQS notifications.

  Why this is correct

  Snowpipe auto-ingest uses cloud messaging services like SQS to detect new files immediately upon arrival. This serverless feature charges based on the actual compute used for ingestion, making it ideal for frequent, small file arrivals where low latency is critical and managing a dedicated virtual warehouse would be expensive and inefficient.

• ✗

  Creating an External Table and using the REFRESH command every minute.

  Why it's wrong here

  External tables allow querying data directly from cloud storage but are generally slower for complex analytical queries than native Snowflake tables. Manually calling REFRESH frequently is less efficient for data movement than Snowpipe, as it does not automatically move the data into Snowflake’s optimized micro-partition storage for high-performance querying.