Free Practice Questions for Snowflake SOL-C01 Exam

The COMPLETE function enables natural language generation within Snowflake Cortex. It accepts a prompt and produces a text-based completion using an underlying large language model (LLM). COMPLETE can generate single-turn or multi-turn responses, depending on how the prompt is structured. It is used for tasks such as drafting summaries, generating recommendations, writing structured output such as JSON, or extending existing text. It is not a classification tool—that role is served by CLASSIFY_TEXT—and it does not perform linguistic translation (TRANSLATE) or document extraction (PARSE_DOCUMENT). COMPLETE allows developers and analysts to embed AI-driven generative capabilities directly within SQL pipelines or Snowpark processes, eliminating the need for external LLM services.

=======================================

The DATA_RETENTION_TIME_IN_DAYS parameter controls the Time Travel retention period for Snowflake objects such as tables, schemas, and databases. It specifies the number of days that historical data (prior versions of rows or dropped objects) is retained and accessible via Time Travel. Within this retention window, users can query data “as of” a previous time, restore dropped objects, or clone objects at a historical point.

DATE_OUTPUT_FORMAT determines the display format for date values and is unrelated to historical retention. TIMEZONE affects how timestamps are interpreted and displayed, not how long data history is preserved. USE_CACHED_RESULT governs whether Snowflake may return cached query results, not Time Travel behavior.

==================

The correct SQL syntax to create a zero-copy clone of an existing table is:

CREATE TABLE MY_TABLE_CLONE CLONE MY_TABLE;

This command instantly creates a new table that references the same underlying micro-partitions as the original. Because of Snowflake’smetadata-only cloning, no storage is consumed at the time of creation. Storage only increases when either the original or the clone diverges through DML operations, following acopy-on-writemodel.

Cloning is available for multiple object types—tables, schemas, databases, stages, streams, tasks, and more. This capability enables rapid creation of development sandboxes, QA environments, rollback copies, or controlled experimentation without duplicating data.

Incorrect options:

“COPY TABLE” is not a valid Snowflake command.

BACKUP/RESTORE are not Snowflake SQL commands.

RESTORE applies only to Time Travel or Fail-safe, not to cloning.

Thus, the CLONE keyword is the only correct method for zero-copy duplication.

====================================================

Snowflake is a fully managed, cloud-native platform that automates nearly all infrastructure tasks. Two defining characteristics are:

1. Snowflake handles platform maintenance, management, and upgrades.

Snowflake automatically performs software updates, scaling operations, tuning, optimization, and patching. Users never need to upgrade hardware, install software, or manage clusters.

2. There is no infrastructure for customers to provision and maintain.

All compute, storage, and services run on public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP). Snowflake abstracts the underlying infrastructure completely, eliminating the need for customers to manage VMs, disks, clusters, or networking.

Incorrect options:

• Snowflake supportsbothcolumn-level security (via masking policies)androw-level security (via row access policies).

• Snowflake is not responsible foralldata security—customers must configure RBAC, masking, and governance.

• Snowflake doesnotrun on-premises; it is exclusively cloud-based.

Thus, options C and D correctly describe Snowflake platform characteristics.

==================

Snowflake supports zero-copy cloning at thedatabase,schema, andtablelevels. Cloning creates a new metadata reference to existing data without physically duplicating micro-partitions, significantly reducing storage cost and clone creation time. Cloning adatabasereplicates all schemas and tables within it at that moment in time. Cloning aschemareplicates all objects inside that schema, including tables and views. Cloning atablecreates an isolated version of that table for development, testing, or analysis. Importantly,rolescannot be cloned because they are account-level security objects, not data objects. Privileges must be manually granted or recreated for cloned objects. Cloning enables rapid, efficient creation of consistent environments for workload isolation and testing.

=======================================

Snowflake Notebooks support both SQL and Python as executable cell types. This means that users can create notebook cells written in Python for programmatic data processing and modeling, and in SQL for declarative querying and transformation. Because of this, the statements “Notebook cells can be written in Python” and “Notebook cells can be written in SQL” are both correct.

Snowflake databases do not natively execute queries written in Scala; Scala is supported via Snowpark APIs for application code, not as a direct query language. Worksheets in Snowsight are primarily SQL-based and also support procedural constructs (e.g., Snowflake Scripting), so the phrase “only in SQL” is not a precise or complete characterization. Dashboards in Snowsight are created using SQL-backed visualizations and built-in UI components; JavaScript is not a supported authoring language inside the native dashboarding layer. Therefore, options B, D, and E are not correct in this context.

==================

External stages point to files in external cloud storage (S3, Azure Blob, GCS). Because the data is not stored inside Snowflake, the user avoids Snowflake storage charges, which can significantly reduce cost for large staging datasets.

External stages do not automatically delete files, are not inherently more secure than internal stages, and still count as database objects even though they reference external storage.

==================

TheGRANTcommand is used in Snowflake to assign privileges to a role. GRANT allows administrators to authorize roles to perform actions on objects such as tables, warehouses, schemas, or databases. The REVOKE command removes privileges, CREATE creates objects, and ASSIGN is not a valid Snowflake command. Therefore, GRANT is the correct command for privilege assignment.

=======================================

The SENTIMENT function in Snowflake Cortex analyzes text and returns a numerical sentiment score between -1 and 1. This value indicates whether the text expresses negative, positive, or neutral sentiment. It accepts English-language text and uses Snowflake’s managed AI models to infer polarity based on contextual understanding. A negative score represents negative emotion, a positive score represents positive emotion, and values near zero indicate neutrality. It is ideal for customer reviews, feedback analysis, and text mining. TRANSLATE is used for language translation, COMPLETE for text generation, and PARSE_DOCUMENT for extracting text from documents—not sentiment analysis. SENTIMENT provides fast, in-database AI inference without external model hosting or integration.

=======================================

Standard permanent tables in Snowflake have a default1-day Time Travel retention period. During this period, users may query historical data, restore dropped tables, or clone past states. Higher editions allow extending this period up to 90 days. Temporary and transient tables have 0-day retention by default.

====================================================