ADA-C01 Question 389
Single answerUse the ORGANIZATION_USAGE schema in the SNOWFLAKE shared databaseA global Snowflake organization has several accounts across AWS and Azure. The central platform team wants to build an executive dashboard that shows credit consumption trends and storage usage across all accounts from a single query location. They also want to avoid building custom data-sharing pipelines between accounts. Which approach should the Snowflake administrator take?
- A
Query the SNOWFLAKE shared database's ORGANIZATION_USAGE schema from an organization account to access cross-account usage views.
- B
Query each account's ACCOUNT_USAGE schema and create external functions to merge the results across accounts in real time.
- C
Enable replication of the SNOWFLAKE database from each account into a central account, then query ACCOUNT_USAGE views there.
- D
Use INFORMATION_SCHEMA views in one account, because they automatically include all usage data for every account in the organization.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
The best answer is to use the ORGANIZATION_USAGE schema in the SNOWFLAKE shared database. This schema is intended for organization-level reporting and allows administrators to analyze usage, billing, and storage trends across multiple accounts in the same organization from a centralized location. By contrast, ACCOUNT_USAGE is limited to a single account, so it does not satisfy the requirement for cross-account reporting without additional consolidation work. INFORMATION_SCHEMA also does not provide the same organization-wide operational usage views. Snowflake documentation distinguishes ACCOUNT_USAGE for account-level history from ORGANIZATION_USAGE for organization-level visibility, making ORGANIZATION_USAGE the recommended approach for executive dashboards spanning multiple accounts.
- A. Correct.
Correct. The ORGANIZATION_USAGE schema in the SNOWFLAKE shared database is designed for organization-wide monitoring and reporting across accounts in the same Snowflake organization. It provides organization-level usage and billing-related views, allowing a central team to query cross-account consumption and storage data without building custom consolidation pipelines. This is the intended solution for centralized reporting across multiple accounts.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. ACCOUNT_USAGE views are scoped to a single account, not the entire organization. While a team could technically collect and merge data from multiple accounts, using external functions for this purpose is unnecessary and not the native pattern Snowflake provides for organization-wide observability. The scenario specifically calls for a single-query-location approach without custom pipelines, which points to ORGANIZATION_USAGE instead.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. The SNOWFLAKE database is a system-provided shared database, and the proposed approach misrepresents how usage data should be centralized. ACCOUNT_USAGE remains account-scoped, and replication is not the standard or necessary method for consolidating organization-wide usage reporting. ORGANIZATION_USAGE already exists to solve this problem directly.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. INFORMATION_SCHEMA is primarily intended for metadata discovery within a database or account context and does not automatically provide organization-wide usage visibility across all accounts. A common misconception is that INFORMATION_SCHEMA can replace usage views for governance dashboards, but for organization-level reporting Snowflake provides ORGANIZATION_USAGE.