ADA-C01 Question 443
Select 2Explain the role of replicationsA global company runs its primary Snowflake deployment in AWS us-east-1 and wants to improve business continuity for a critical analytics application. The application depends on shared reference data stored in several databases and on low-latency local reads for users in Europe. The Snowflake administrator is asked to design a solution using replication. Which TWO statements correctly describe the role of replication in this scenario?
- A
Replication can be used to maintain read-only secondary copies of supported objects in another region/account so they can be promoted for disaster recovery or queried locally after refresh.
- B
Replication continuously synchronizes virtual warehouse state and currently running queries so compute can resume automatically in the target region without reconfiguration.
- C
Replication helps distribute data closer to users in another region by copying supported metadata and data objects, but separate compute resources must still be provisioned in the target account/region.
- D
Replication replaces the need for Fail-safe and Time Travel because replicated databases provide the same recovery semantics for dropped or changed data.
- E
Replication is primarily intended to copy client connection settings, network policies, and user session state so applications can reconnect seamlessly after a regional outage.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answers: A, C
Explanation
The best answers are 1 and 3. In Snowflake, replication is primarily used to copy supported databases and certain account objects across regions or accounts to support disaster recovery, business continuity, and data locality. Secondary replicas are read-only until a failover or promotion action is taken, and replication does not include warehouse state, running queries, or user sessions. For a realistic design, administrators should pair replicated data objects with separately provisioned compute in the target region/account. This aligns with Snowflake documentation on replication and failover groups, database replication, and the separation of storage services from virtual warehouses. Replication complements, but does not replace, other Snowflake protection features such as Time Travel and Fail-safe.
- A. Correct.
Correct. Snowflake replication is used to create and maintain secondary copies of supported objects, such as databases and certain account-level objects depending on the replication configuration and edition/features in use. These secondary objects are read-only until promoted/failover occurs, making replication a core capability for cross-region/cross-account business continuity and for providing local access to replicated data after refresh.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Snowflake replication does not replicate virtual warehouse state, active compute, or in-flight queries. Warehouses are compute resources and must be created and managed separately in the target environment. A common misconception is to treat replication like full infrastructure mirroring; in Snowflake, replication focuses on supported data and metadata, not active execution state.
- C. Correct.
Correct. Replication supports geographic data distribution and disaster recovery by copying supported objects to another region/account, which can reduce data access latency for local users. However, compute is not replicated, so administrators must provision warehouses in the target region/account to run workloads there. This distinction between replicated storage/metadata and separately managed compute is important operationally.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Replication does not replace Time Travel or Fail-safe. Time Travel and Fail-safe are recovery features associated with data protection and historical recovery semantics, while replication creates secondary copies for availability, disaster recovery, and geographic distribution. Candidates may choose this if they confuse multiple recovery-related capabilities, but they serve different roles.
- E. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Replication is not designed to copy user session state or make application reconnect behavior seamless at the session level. Some account objects can be replicated depending on object type and feature support, but client connection settings, live sessions, and active network behavior are not the primary role of replication. This option overstates replication as a session failover mechanism rather than a data/object replication capability.