ADA-C01 Question 439
Single answerShare data among different Snowflake editionsA software company uses a Snowflake Business Critical account to host regulated customer data and wants to share a subset of non-sensitive reporting tables with an external partner that uses a Standard edition Snowflake account. The administrator creates a secure share containing only approved tables, but the partner reports that they cannot create a database from the share. The provider wants the simplest approach that allows sharing to continue while meeting Snowflake requirements. What should the administrator do?
- A
Ask Snowflake Support to enable cross-edition sharing from the Business Critical account to the partner's Standard edition account.
- B
Convert the secure share into a database replication group and replicate it to the partner's account.
- C
Require the partner to upgrade to Enterprise edition, because Standard edition accounts cannot consume any direct shares.
- D
Unload the approved tables to external stage files and let the partner load them manually, because direct sharing is not supported across editions.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
This question tests a practical administration scenario involving edition boundaries in Snowflake Secure Data Sharing. A lower edition consumer, including Standard edition, can generally consume shares, but sharing from a Business Critical provider to a non-Business Critical consumer is restricted unless cross-edition sharing is enabled by Snowflake. In real environments, administrators commonly encounter this when a regulated provider account needs to share approved subsets externally without copying data. The best practice is to keep using secure shares and work with Snowflake Support to enable the required cross-edition capability rather than building file-based distribution processes or misusing replication. This aligns with Snowflake documentation on Secure Data Sharing and account edition/security considerations for Business Critical accounts.
- A. Correct.
Correct. By default, data sharing from a Business Critical (or higher) account to a lower edition account is restricted because of the security boundary differences. Snowflake supports cross-edition sharing in this scenario only when the provider explicitly enables it through Snowflake Support. This is the simplest way to continue using secure data sharing without redesigning the solution.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Replication and failover features are not a replacement for direct data sharing to an external consumer. Replication is intended for copying databases and related objects across accounts/regions/clouds for business continuity and data distribution scenarios, but it does not solve the specific restriction around a lower-edition consumer creating a database from a Business Critical share.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. A Standard edition account can consume shared data. The issue is not that Standard cannot consume shares at all; the issue is that the provider is on Business Critical and the consumer is on a lower edition. The required action is to enable cross-edition sharing, not to force an Enterprise upgrade.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Manual unload and reload would work technically, but it is not the simplest or best Snowflake-native solution. It adds operational overhead, loses the benefits of secure sharing such as no data copying and near real-time access, and is unnecessary when Snowflake provides a supported cross-edition sharing path via Support enablement.