COF-C03 - Snowflake AI Data Cloud Features and Architecture - Section 1.7

Distinguish table types (permanent, transient, temporary, external, dynamic, and Apache Iceberg) and view types (standard, secure, and materialized).

Distinguish permanent, transient, and temporary tables by their Time Travel and Fail-safe behaviour and cost, and recognise external tables over data lake files, dynamic tables that refresh from a query, and Apache Iceberg tables in open table format. Compare standard, secure, and materialized views and when each is appropriate.

permanent transient temporary tablesexternal tablesdynamic tablesApache Iceberg tablessecure and materialized views

Practice question for this objective

Free sampleSnowflake AI Data Cloud Features and Architecturemedium

A team is comparing transient tables with temporary tables in Snowflake to decide which to use for intermediate pipeline data. Which statements correctly describe how transient tables differ from temporary tables? Select TWO.

  • AA transient table retains a default Time Travel window of ninety days, whereas a temporary table retains a default Time Travel window of forty-five days.
  • BA transient table persists until it is explicitly dropped and is visible to other sessions, whereas a temporary table exists only for the session that created it. Correct
  • CA transient table can be shared in a secure share, whereas a temporary table is the only type that supports zero-copy cloning to another database.
  • DBoth transient and temporary tables skip the Fail-safe period, so neither incurs the seven-day Fail-safe storage that a permanent table carries. Correct
Distinguish transient tables, which persist across sessions without Fail-safe, from session-scoped temporary tables that also lack Fail-safe. Transient tables are durable, cross-session objects dropped only on command, while temporary tables live and die with their session; crucially, both omit the seven-day Fail-safe period that permanent tables carry, which is the cost saving teams seek for disposable staging data.

Why A is wrong: This is tempting because Time Travel is real, but both transient and temporary tables allow only zero or one day of Time Travel, not ninety or forty-five days.

Why B is correct: Transient tables are persistent, account-wide objects that survive across sessions until dropped, while temporary tables are scoped to and dropped at the end of the creating session.

Why C is wrong: Zero-copy cloning is supported across permanent and transient tables too, so the claim that only temporary tables can be cloned is false and misstates clone behaviour.

Why D is correct: Neither type has Fail-safe, so both avoid the seven-day Fail-safe storage cost that permanent tables incur, which is a genuine shared property.

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