SnowPro Advanced: Data Engineer · Free practice question 2 of 10
Dynamic tables with TARGET_LAG
A reporting layer needs to stay within 15 minutes of source-table freshness with minimal operational overhead. The transformation involves a multi-way join and a few aggregations. Which Snowflake feature best meets this requirement?
- A.A materialized view over the joined source tables.
- B.A dynamic table with TARGET_LAG = '15 minutes'.
- C.A scheduled task that runs CREATE OR REPLACE TABLE AS SELECT every 15 minutes.
- D.A stream on each source table consumed by a task on a 15-minute schedule.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. A dynamic table with TARGET_LAG = '15 minutes'.
Why: Dynamic tables were designed exactly for this — declare a TARGET_LAG and Snowflake incrementally maintains the table to meet the freshness SLA. Materialized views don't support arbitrary joins across multiple large tables. Scheduled CTAS does a full rebuild every run (wasteful). Streams + tasks work but require you to write and maintain the orchestration that dynamic tables give you for free.
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