SnowPro Advanced: Security Engineer Question 229
Single answerExecute replication and failover operations:A financial services company uses account-level object replication between a primary Snowflake account in AWS us-east-1 and a secondary account in AWS us-west-2. The Security Engineer is responsible for disaster recovery of security-related configuration, including users, roles, grants, network policies, and masking/row access policies. During a regional outage affecting the primary account, the team must promote the secondary account so security administration can continue with minimal manual reconfiguration. Which action should the Security Engineer take to correctly execute failover for the replicated security objects?
- A
Run ALTER REPLICATION GROUP <replication_group_name> REFRESH in the secondary account, then resume security administration there.
- B
Run ALTER FAILOVER GROUP <failover_group_name> PRIMARY in the secondary account to promote it, then manage the replicated security objects from the new primary account.
- C
Run SYSTEM$FAILOVER_TO_ACCOUNT('<secondary_account_locator>') from the primary account to switch all replicated security objects to the secondary account.
- D
Convert the replicated database to read/write in the secondary account using ALTER DATABASE ... SET READ_ONLY = FALSE, then recreate any missing users and roles manually.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B
Explanation
For disaster recovery of security-related account objects, Snowflake uses failover groups, not just database replication or replication groups. Failover groups support replication and failover of eligible account objects, including many security administration objects such as users, roles, grants, and network policies, along with supported databases and shares. In a real outage, the correct operational step is to promote the secondary by running ALTER FAILOVER GROUP
- A. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Refreshing a replication group updates replicated data or metadata from the source, but it does not promote the target account for write activity. During an outage of the primary, the secondary remains read-only for replicated objects until a failover operation is executed on the failover group. This option reflects a common confusion between replication refresh and failover promotion.
- B. Correct.
Correct. Failover groups are the Snowflake mechanism used to replicate and fail over account objects such as users, roles, grants, network policies, and other supported security-related objects. Executing ALTER FAILOVER GROUP
PRIMARY in the secondary account promotes that secondary to become the writable primary for the failover group, allowing security administration to continue there. - C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. There is no supported SQL command named SYSTEM$FAILOVER_TO_ACCOUNT for promoting a secondary account in Snowflake replication/failover. This distractor targets candidates who assume there is a generic system function for account failover rather than the documented ALTER FAILOVER GROUP command.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Replicated security objects are not made writable by changing a database read-only property, and account objects such as users and roles are not managed through database-level settings. In addition, a replicated database alone does not address failover of account-level security configuration. Manual recreation would also defeat the goal of minimizing reconfiguration during disaster recovery.