SnowPro Advanced: Data Engineer · Free practice question 3 of 10
Snowpipe Streaming for sub-10-second latency
An application produces roughly 200 clickstream events per second. Downstream analysts need to query the events in Snowflake within 10 seconds of arrival. Which ingestion approach best matches this SLA?
- A.Snowpipe with cloud storage auto-ingest triggered by SQS/PubSub notifications.
- B.Snowpipe Streaming via the Snowflake Ingest SDK.
- C.A Snowpark job that reads S3 every 30 seconds on a schedule.
- D.An external table over the raw S3 prefix with a materialized view on top.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Snowpipe Streaming via the Snowflake Ingest SDK.
Why: Snowpipe Streaming provides sub-10-second end-to-end latency for row-level streaming ingestion — that's its purpose. File-based Snowpipe has a ~1-minute floor because it batches per file. Scheduled Snowpark jobs inherit their schedule interval as latency. External tables add per-query metadata refresh cost and don't materialize rows into Snowflake tables.
More free SnowPro Advanced: Data Engineer questions
- Snowpark lazy evaluation
- Dynamic tables with TARGET_LAG
- Fan-in task DAGs with AFTER
- Time Travel vs Fail-safe recovery window
- Maintaining externally managed Iceberg tables
- External table partition metadata refresh
- Tag propagation across data movement
- Query Acceleration max scale factor
- Alerting on Cortex AI credit usage