ADA-C01 Question 465
Single answerCreate and maintain reader accountsA data provider shares a secure view with several external customers by using Snowflake reader accounts. One customer reports that their analysts can connect successfully, but queries against the shared data fail because no warehouse is available. The provider also wants to enforce a monthly credit limit for this customer without affecting other reader accounts. Which action should the Snowflake administrator take?
- A
Create a virtual warehouse inside the customer’s reader account and set a resource monitor on that account’s warehouse.
- B
Grant the customer’s reader account access to an existing warehouse in the provider account and attach a resource monitor to that shared warehouse.
- C
Create a warehouse in the provider account, then map it to the reader account so the customer can use it with a warehouse-level credit quota.
- D
Enable serverless compute for the secure view so the reader account can query shared data without a warehouse, then apply a reader-account storage quota.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
Reader accounts are special Snowflake accounts created by a provider for consumers who do not have their own Snowflake account. The provider is responsible for creating and maintaining users, roles, and warehouses in those reader accounts. Because readers need compute to query shared objects, a warehouse must be created in the reader account. To enforce monthly spend limits for a specific customer, best practice is to place a resource monitor on the warehouse used by that reader account. This gives the provider customer-specific cost control without affecting other reader accounts. Snowflake documentation on reader accounts and resource monitors supports this model: providers manage compute inside reader accounts, and resource monitors are used to observe and cap warehouse credit consumption.
- A. Correct.
Correct. Reader accounts require compute resources to run queries, and the provider must create and manage warehouses within each reader account. To control usage for a specific customer independently, the administrator should create a warehouse in that reader account and use a resource monitor to track and limit credits consumed by that warehouse. This is the supported way to maintain reader accounts while isolating billing controls per customer.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. A reader account cannot directly use a warehouse from the provider’s regular account in the way standard shared data consumers might use their own compute. Warehouses are managed within the reader account itself. Even if a shared warehouse existed elsewhere, attaching one resource monitor to it would not provide clean per-reader-account isolation if multiple consumers were involved.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Snowflake does not support creating a warehouse in the provider account and then mapping or assigning it to a reader account for that customer’s direct use. This option sounds plausible because data sharing occurs across account boundaries, but compute for reader accounts is provisioned and administered as part of the reader account environment.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Querying shared data from a reader account still requires warehouse compute; secure views do not eliminate that requirement. Also, storage quotas are not the mechanism used to control monthly query credit consumption for reader accounts. Resource monitors are the relevant feature for warehouse credit governance.