Question 20 - ARA-C01 discussion

Option B is the best design to meet the requirements because it uses Snowpipe to ingest the data continuously and efficiently as new records arrive in the object storage, leveraging event notifications.Snowpipe is a service that automates the loading of data from external sources into Snowflake tables1. It also uses streams and tasks to orchestrate transformations on the ingested data.Streams are objects that store the change history of a table, and tasks are objects that execute SQL statements on a schedule or when triggered by another task2. Option B also uses an external function to do model inference with Amazon Comprehend and write the final records to a Snowflake table.An external function is a user-defined function that calls an external API, such as Amazon Comprehend, to perform computations that are not natively supported by Snowflake3. Finally, option B uses the Snowflake Marketplace to make the de-identified final data set available publicly for advertising companies who use different cloud providers in different regions.The Snowflake Marketplace is a platform that enables data providers to list and share their data sets with data consumers, regardless of the cloud platform or region they use4.

Option A is not the best design because it uses copy into to ingest the data, which is not as efficient and continuous as Snowpipe. Copy into is a SQL command that loads data from files into a table in a single transaction. It also exports the data into Amazon S3 to do model inference with Amazon Comprehend, which adds an extra step and increases the operational complexity and maintenance of the infrastructure.

Option C is not the best design because it uses Amazon EMR and PySpark to ingest and transform the data, which also increases the operational complexity and maintenance of the infrastructure. Amazon EMR is a cloud service that provides a managed Hadoop framework to process and analyze large-scale data sets. PySpark is a Python API for Spark, a distributed computing framework that can run on Hadoop. Option C also develops a python program to do model inference by leveraging the Amazon Comprehend text analysis API, which increases the development effort.

Option D is not the best design because it is identical to option A, except for the ingestion method. It still exports the data into Amazon S3 to do model inference with Amazon Comprehend, which adds an extra step and increases the operational complexity and maintenance of the infrastructure.

The copy into <table> command is used to load data from staged files into an existing table in Snowflake.The command supports various file formats, such as CSV, JSON, AVRO, ORC, PARQUET, and XML1.

The match_by_column_name parameter is a copy option that enables loading semi-structured data into separate columns in the target table that match corresponding columns represented in the source data.The parameter can have one of the following values2:

CASE_SENSITIVE: The column names in the source data must match the column names in the target table exactly, including the case. This is the default value.

CASE_INSENSITIVE: The column names in the source data must match the column names in the target table, but the case is ignored.

NONE: The column names in the source data are ignored, and the data is loaded based on the order of the columns in the target table.

The match_by_column_name parameter only applies to semi-structured data, such as JSON, AVRO, ORC, PARQUET, and XML.It does not apply to CSV data, which is considered structured data2.

When using the copy into <table> command with the CSV file format, the match_by_column_name parameter behaves as follows2:

It expects a header to be present in the CSV file, which is matched to a case-sensitive table column name. This means that the first row of the CSV file must contain the column names, and they must match the column names in the target table exactly, including the case. If the header is missing or does not match, the command will return an error.

The parameter will not be ignored, even if it is set to NONE. The command will still try to match the column names in the CSV file with the column names in the target table, and will return an error if they do not match.

The command will not return a warning stating that the file has unmatched columns. It will either load the data successfully if the column names match, or return an error if they do not match.

1: COPY INTO <table> | Snowflake Documentation

2: MATCH_BY_COLUMN_NAME | Snowflake Documentation