ARA-C01 Question 23
Select 2Features/capabilities that can be leveraged across accountsA global enterprise uses separate Snowflake accounts for each business unit and wants to centralize governance and operational capabilities while minimizing data duplication. The architecture team needs a solution that allows one account to make governed data products and selected platform capabilities available to other Snowflake accounts. Which TWO capabilities can be leveraged across accounts to meet this requirement?
- A
Secure Data Sharing, so a provider account can expose databases or shares to consumer accounts without copying the underlying data
- B
Replication and failover groups, so databases and certain account-level objects can be made available in another account for business continuity and cross-account access patterns
- C
Streams, so change data captured in one account can be directly queried and consumed in another account without any additional object creation
- D
Materialized views, so a view defined in one account can be directly referenced and refreshed by virtual warehouses in another account
- E
Reader accounts, so external parties can access shared data without managing their own Snowflake account
Show answer and explanation
Correct answers: A, B
Explanation
The best answers are Secure Data Sharing and Replication/failover groups. Snowflake supports several features that operate across accounts, but they serve different purposes. Secure Data Sharing is the primary mechanism for exposing governed data products across Snowflake accounts without copying data, making it ideal for internal multi-account architectures. Replication and failover groups are also leveraged across accounts, especially for disaster recovery, regional distribution, and maintaining copies of supported objects in secondary accounts. By contrast, streams and materialized views are not native cross-account consumption features. Reader accounts are a valid sharing-related feature, but they are intended mainly for consumers without their own Snowflake account. This aligns with Snowflake documentation on Secure Data Sharing, replication and failover, and reader accounts, all of which are commonly evaluated in architect-level design scenarios.
- A. Correct.
Correct. Secure Data Sharing is a core Snowflake capability designed specifically for cross-account access. A provider account can create shares and grant objects such as tables and secure views to consumer accounts, enabling near real-time access without moving or copying the data. This is commonly used for internal multi-account organizations as well as external data distribution. It directly addresses the requirement to expose governed data products across accounts while minimizing duplication.
- B. Correct.
Correct. Replication and failover groups are cross-account capabilities that can make supported objects available in another account, typically across regions and clouds for business continuity and disaster recovery. In practice, architects also leverage replication to distribute databases and selected account objects to secondary accounts under controlled scenarios. While not a substitute for Secure Data Sharing when zero-copy live sharing is the goal, it is a valid capability that can be leveraged across accounts.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Streams track change data capture metadata on tables and views within a Snowflake account context, but they are not themselves a cross-account consumption mechanism. A stream created in one account cannot simply be queried directly from another account. To use changed data across accounts, architects would need another mechanism such as sharing replicated objects or building pipelines, not direct cross-account stream access.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Materialized views do not function as a cross-account object-sharing capability in the way described. They are created and maintained within the account that owns them and cannot be directly referenced and refreshed by another account's warehouses as a native cross-account feature. This option confuses object optimization features with cross-account access capabilities.
- E. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Reader accounts do allow external organizations to consume shared data without having their own Snowflake account, and they are indeed a cross-account-related sharing feature. However, a reader account is not another full Snowflake account in the same sense as an independently managed business-unit account, and it is primarily intended for data consumers who do not already operate Snowflake. In this scenario, the enterprise already uses separate Snowflake accounts for business units, so Secure Data Sharing between existing accounts is the more appropriate capability. Therefore this is plausible but not the best fit for the requirement as stated.