SnowPro Associate: Platform Question 354
Single answer● Snowflake MarketplaceA financial analytics company subscribes to a third-party weather dataset through Snowflake Marketplace to improve its risk models. The data science team needs immediate read access to the provider's latest shared data, but the company does not want to duplicate or regularly reload the dataset into its own tables. Which approach should the Snowflake administrator take to meet these requirements?
- A
Create a listing subscription from Snowflake Marketplace so Snowflake creates a database from the provider's share, then grant the team access to that database
- B
Use Snowpipe to continuously load the provider's Marketplace data into an internal table owned by the company
- C
Create an external stage that points to the provider's cloud storage and query the files directly with external tables
- D
Replicate the provider's data into the company's account by creating a database clone of the provider's production database
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
Snowflake Marketplace is built on Secure Data Sharing. When a consumer subscribes to a listing, Snowflake provides access to the provider's shared data as a database in the consumer account, allowing direct querying without ETL, file movement, or table-level duplication. This is one of the key value propositions of the Marketplace: fast access to live shared data with reduced data engineering effort. For SnowPro Associate, candidates should recognize that Marketplace consumption is based on shares and read-only access patterns, not Snowpipe ingestion, external stages, or cross-account cloning. Relevant Snowflake documentation covers Snowflake Marketplace, data consumers subscribing to listings, and Secure Data Sharing behavior.
- A. Correct.
Correct. When a consumer subscribes to a Snowflake Marketplace listing, Snowflake makes the shared dataset available in the consumer account as a database created from the provider's share. This gives near-immediate read access to the provider-maintained data without copying the data into consumer-owned tables. The administrator can then grant the required database objects and privileges to the data science team.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Snowpipe is used to ingest files into Snowflake tables, typically from cloud storage events. Marketplace consumer access does not require building an ingestion pipeline, and this option would introduce unnecessary data duplication and operational overhead, which the scenario explicitly wants to avoid.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Consumers of Marketplace data do not typically access the provider's raw cloud storage directly. Marketplace listings are delivered through Snowflake sharing mechanisms, not by exposing the provider's storage bucket for the consumer to stage and query. This reflects a common misconception that all shared data must come through stages or external tables.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. A consumer cannot create a database clone of a provider's production database across accounts in order to subscribe to Marketplace data. Database cloning is not the mechanism used for Marketplace access. Instead, listings are consumed through shares that expose data as a read-only database in the consumer account.