ADA-C01 Question 565
Single answerAnalyze Snowflake edition implications for Time TravelA company is running Snowflake Standard Edition for its development environment and Enterprise Edition for production. After an accidental DELETE on a critical table in development, the administrator tries to restore the data from 3 days earlier using Time Travel and discovers the historical data is no longer available. The team now wants development to support recovering data up to 5 days back without changing application logic. Which action should the administrator take?
- A
Increase the DATA_RETENTION_TIME_IN_DAYS parameter to 5 on the development database while remaining on Standard Edition
- B
Upgrade the development account to Enterprise Edition or higher, then set DATA_RETENTION_TIME_IN_DAYS to 5 on the required objects
- C
Enable Fail-safe for the development database and use it to restore table data from 5 days earlier
- D
Clone the production database into development so the development environment inherits the 5-day Time Travel setting permanently
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B
Explanation
This scenario tests whether the candidate understands that Time Travel retention is governed by both configuration and Snowflake edition. In Standard Edition, historical retention for Time Travel is limited to 1 day, so a requirement to recover data from 5 days earlier cannot be met simply by changing DATA_RETENTION_TIME_IN_DAYS. To support 5-day recovery in development, the account must be on Enterprise Edition (or higher), and the retention parameter must be set on the relevant scope. This is a common administrative decision point when balancing cost and recovery objectives across environments. Snowflake documentation on Time Travel and object parameters explains that retention depends on edition and object type, while Fail-safe is distinct from Time Travel and is not intended for self-service point-in-time recovery.
- A. Incorrect.
Incorrect. In Standard Edition, Time Travel retention is limited to 1 day. Although DATA_RETENTION_TIME_IN_DAYS is a configurable parameter, the effective maximum retention depends on the Snowflake edition. Setting it to 5 in Standard Edition does not provide 5 days of recoverable history.
- B. Correct.
Correct. Enterprise Edition and higher support extended Time Travel retention beyond 1 day for permanent objects, up to the edition-supported limit. After upgrading, the administrator must still configure DATA_RETENTION_TIME_IN_DAYS appropriately at the account, database, schema, or object level to achieve a 5-day retention period.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Fail-safe is not a user-serviceable recovery feature for routine self-service restoration and does not replace Time Travel. It is intended for disaster recovery situations handled by Snowflake and cannot be used by administrators to query or restore table data interactively from a chosen point in time.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Cloning production into development may create a copy at a point in time, but it does not solve the underlying edition limitation for ongoing 5-day Time Travel in the development account. The ability to retain and access historical data over multiple days depends on the edition and configured retention settings in that environment.