ADA-C01 Question 521
Single answerGiven a scenario, determine account replication considerations with respect to the different Snowflake editionsA company runs a business-critical Snowflake deployment in an Enterprise Edition account on AWS us-east-1. The disaster recovery team wants to replicate the account to a secondary account in another region and potentially another cloud provider. During planning, the secondary account is discovered to be Standard Edition because it was created earlier for development workloads. The team asks what must be true before account replication can be configured successfully for this production DR design. Which statement is correct?
- A
Account replication can be configured as long as the primary account is Enterprise Edition; the target account edition does not matter.
- B
Both the source and target accounts must be Business Critical (or higher), because account replication is supported only in Business Critical Edition and above.
- C
The target account can remain Standard Edition if replication is limited to databases and shares instead of the full account.
- D
Cross-region and cross-cloud account replication is supported only when both accounts are in the same Snowflake organization, but edition is not a factor.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B
Explanation
For Snowflake account replication and failover/failback planning, edition is a critical prerequisite. Snowflake documents account replication and failover/failback as features available in Business Critical Edition and higher. Therefore, when designing disaster recovery between accounts, both participating accounts must be on a supported edition. This is especially important when organizations reuse older lower-edition accounts as DR targets and assume the source account's edition is enough. Candidates should distinguish account replication from other data movement or sharing capabilities and verify edition, region/cloud topology, and organizational prerequisites together. See Snowflake documentation for replication and failover/failback, including edition prerequisites and cross-region/cross-cloud considerations.
- A. Incorrect.
Incorrect. A common misconception is that only the source account's edition controls replication capability. For account replication and failover/failback, Snowflake requires the participating accounts to be on a supported edition. Having only the primary account on a higher edition is not sufficient.
- B. Correct.
Correct. Account replication and failover/failback are supported for Business Critical Edition (or higher). For a production DR design using account replication, both the source and target accounts must meet the edition requirement. If the secondary account is Standard Edition, it must be upgraded before this design can be implemented.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. This mixes up database-level sharing/replication ideas with account replication requirements. Even if the team narrows scope, account replication itself is not enabled by leaving the target account on Standard Edition. The edition requirement still applies for account replication-related features.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Being in the same organization is relevant for organization-level administration and some replication/failover scenarios, but it does not replace edition requirements. Edition is a key consideration for account replication, and a Standard Edition target account would still block the planned solution.