SnowPro Advanced: Architect · Free practice question 1 of 10
Ingestion architecture
An Architect needs to design a pipeline that ingests JSON events from an Amazon S3 landing bucket into Snowflake. Files land every ~30 seconds and downstream users need to query the events within a minute of arrival. Which combination best meets the latency requirement while keeping operational overhead low?
- A.Snowpipe with auto-ingest triggered by S3 event notifications, plus a task-scheduled MERGE to a curated table.
- B.A COPY INTO command scheduled every 5 minutes on a warehouse, followed by a task that transforms the data.
- C.An external table pointed at the S3 prefix and a materialized view on top for latency.
- D.A Snowpark job that polls S3 every 60 seconds and inserts rows manually.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Snowpipe with auto-ingest triggered by S3 event notifications, plus a task-scheduled MERGE to a curated table.
Why: Snowpipe auto-ingest is purpose-built for continuous file-based ingestion — S3 events trigger loads within roughly a minute. Scheduled COPY INTO inherits the schedule as its latency floor. External tables add per-query metadata refresh cost. Custom polling is unnecessary reinvention of Snowpipe.