ADA-C01 Question 514
Single answerPerform account replicationA global company uses Snowflake Business Critical Edition and wants to set up cross-region disaster recovery for a production account in AWS US East (N. Virginia) to a secondary account in AWS US West (Oregon). The primary account contains several databases and internal stages used by ETL jobs. An administrator has already verified that the target region is supported and that a failover group will be used for account-level replication and failover. Before enabling replication, the security team asks what else must be validated to ensure the replication setup will work as expected. Which action is the MOST important to confirm?
- A
Verify that both accounts belong to the same organization so that account replication and failover can be configured between them.
- B
Verify that all virtual warehouses in the primary account are the same size as warehouses in the secondary account before replication is enabled.
- C
Verify that external stages in the primary account use storage integrations, because account replication requires external stages to be replicated automatically.
- D
Verify that the secondary account has identical users and role grants created manually before adding it to the failover group.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
The best answer is to confirm that both accounts are in the same Snowflake organization. For account replication and failover, Snowflake requires supported editions, supported cloud/region combinations, and that the source and target accounts be part of the same organization. In real-world disaster recovery planning, administrators often focus on regions and editions but overlook organizational boundaries, which will block setup entirely.
This scenario also tests common misconceptions:
- Warehouses are not replicated; compute is managed independently in each account.
- External stages do not mean the underlying external cloud storage is replicated by Snowflake account replication.
- Failover groups are specifically designed to replicate supported account objects such as users, roles, and grants, so manual duplication is not the core prerequisite.
Best practice is to validate prerequisites first: edition support, organization membership, region/cloud support, object support within the failover group, and any limitations for stages and integrations. Refer to Snowflake documentation on account replication, failover groups, and replication prerequisites for the supported object matrix and setup requirements.
- A. Correct.
Correct. Account replication and failover between accounts requires the accounts to be in the same Snowflake organization. This is a foundational prerequisite for configuring replication or failover groups across accounts. If the accounts are not in the same organization, the administrator cannot establish the replication relationship even if the edition and regions are otherwise supported.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Virtual warehouses are compute resources and are not replicated as part of database or account replication. Warehouse sizing does not need to match between primary and secondary accounts before enabling replication. After failover, compute can be provisioned independently in the secondary account as needed.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. This mixes up supported object behavior. External stages are not automatically replicated the same way replicated databases and supported account objects are. Replication focuses on supported metadata and data objects, while external data remains in external cloud storage. The presence of storage integrations for external stages is not the key prerequisite that determines whether account replication can be configured.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Supported account objects such as users, roles, and grants can be included through a failover group, so manually pre-creating identical principals is not required as a prerequisite. In fact, the purpose of account-level replication is to synchronize supported account objects to the secondary account.