ARA-C01 Question 247
Single answerFail-safeA financial services company stores regulated transaction data in permanent Snowflake tables. To reduce storage costs, the architecture team proposes changing several large historical tables to TRANSIENT because the business already uses Time Travel sparingly. One architect raises a concern that this would weaken the company's last-resort recovery posture after accidental data deletion. Which statement best addresses that concern?
- A
Changing the tables to TRANSIENT removes Fail-safe protection, so after the Time Travel retention period expires Snowflake Support cannot use Fail-safe to recover those table data.
- B
Changing the tables to TRANSIENT has no effect on recovery because Fail-safe still applies to all Snowflake table types, including transient and temporary tables.
- C
Changing the tables to TRANSIENT increases the Fail-safe period from 7 days to 90 days for historical partitions, which improves recoverability while reducing cost.
- D
Changing the tables to TRANSIENT only affects cloning behavior; Fail-safe and Time Travel retention are unchanged for the underlying data.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
This question tests an architect's ability to evaluate the recovery implications of using TRANSIENT objects for cost optimization. In Snowflake, permanent tables support Time Travel and then enter a 7-day Fail-safe period intended as a last-resort recovery mechanism operated by Snowflake. By contrast, transient and temporary tables do not have Fail-safe, which lowers storage costs but reduces recoverability once Time Travel expires. Architecturally, this means regulated or mission-critical datasets that require stronger recovery assurances are often better kept as permanent objects, even if storage cost is higher. This aligns with Snowflake documentation on table types, Time Travel, and Fail-safe, which emphasizes that Fail-safe is not a user-managed backup feature and should not be relied on as an operational restore strategy, but it does provide an additional protection layer for permanent data.
- A. Correct.
Correct. Permanent tables are protected by Time Travel and then a 7-day Fail-safe period. Transient and temporary tables do not have Fail-safe. If a transient table's Time Travel window has passed, there is no Fail-safe-based recovery path available through Snowflake Support. This is the key architectural tradeoff when using transient objects to reduce storage costs.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. This reflects a common misconception that Fail-safe is universal across all table types. In Snowflake, Fail-safe applies to permanent data only. Transient and temporary tables are specifically designed to reduce storage costs partly by eliminating Fail-safe protection.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Fail-safe is not extended to 90 days for transient data. Snowflake's Fail-safe period for eligible permanent objects is 7 days, and transient objects do not have Fail-safe at all. This option combines an incorrect duration with an incorrect assumption about transient object protection.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Changing a table to transient affects more than cloning-related behavior. It changes the data protection model by removing Fail-safe eligibility. Time Travel settings also differ by object type and edition constraints, so the statement that both Fail-safe and Time Travel are unchanged is inaccurate.