Free SnowPro Advanced: Administrator Practice Questions

Sample Practice Questions

Try these 10 sample questions from the SnowPro Advanced: Administrator practice bank. Each includes the answer and explanation. Continue with the interactive practice above to review the full question set.

1. 1An organization is moving account-lifecycle administration from ORGADMIN to GLOBALORGADMIN. Where must its administrators use GLOBALORGADMIN?

   1. A. In each regular account being administered
   2. B. In the organization's organization account
   3. C. In any account with Business Critical edition
   4. D. In the regular account that originally enabled ORGADMIN

   Answer: B

   Explanation: The documentation states, "The role exists only in the organization account." GLOBALORGADMIN must therefore be used there, rather than in a regular account selected by edition or ORGADMIN history.

   Reference: Overview of Access Control — System-defined roles > GLOBALORGADMIN

2. 2An Enterprise organization plans to create an organization account to use premium ORGANIZATION_USAGE views. Which cost implication belongs in its approval?

   1. A. Budget only for queries; automatic view population adds no cost
   2. B. Budget for view population only if the organization has Business Critical accounts
   3. C. Budget for additional costs from automatically populating ORGANIZATION_USAGE
   4. D. Budget for view population only after an administrator first queries a premium view

   Answer: C

   Explanation: The guide says populating ORGANIZATION_USAGE "incurs additional costs for your organization." Creating an organization account is therefore not a cost-free metadata consolidation decision.

   Reference: Organization accounts — Create the organization account > Considerations

3. 3An Enterprise warehouse must scale from one cluster to at most three as concurrent demand fluctuates. Which MIN_CLUSTER_COUNT and MAX_CLUSTER_COUNT settings enable this behavior?

   1. A. MIN = 3, MAX = 3
   2. B. MIN = 1, MAX = 3
   3. C. MIN = 1, MAX = 1
   4. D. MIN = 3, MAX = 1

   Answer: B

   Explanation: Auto-scale mode is enabled by "specifying different values for maximum and minimum number of clusters." A minimum of one and maximum of three supports the required range; equal values configure fixed capacity.

   Reference: Multi-cluster warehouses — Maximized vs. auto-scale > Auto-scale

4. 4Query Profile shows a large aggregation spilling intermediate results to local and remote storage. To increase memory available to that single operation, which change is documented?

   1. A. Increase only MAX_CLUSTER_COUNT at the same warehouse size
   2. B. Use a larger warehouse for the query
   3. C. Reduce the warehouse size while retaining the aggregation
   4. D. Raise STATEMENT_TIMEOUT_IN_SECONDS without resizing the warehouse

   Answer: B

   Explanation: For memory-related spilling, Snowflake recommends "Using a larger warehouse (effectively increasing the available memory/local disk space for the operation)". Additional concurrency clusters or scheduling changes do not increase the memory for this operation.

   Reference: Using Query Profile to analyze query performance — Common query problems > Queries too large to fit in memory

5. 5A provider creates a reader account for a partner that only needs to query this provider's shared data. Which ownership and billing arrangement applies?

   1. A. The provider owns the reader account and pays its charges
   2. B. The provider owns the reader account; Snowflake bills the partner directly
   3. C. The partner owns the reader account; the provider pays its charges
   4. D. The partner owns the reader account and pays Snowflake directly

   Answer: A

   Explanation: The sharing guide states, "The reader account is owned and paid for by your provider account." It lets a consumer query shared data without becoming a licensed full-account customer and consumes data from its creating provider.

   Reference: About Secure Data Sharing — FAQs > Sharing with someone without a Snowflake account

6. 6A Business Critical recovery account holds a secondary failover group. After an outage, which operation transitions the replicated objects from read-only replicas to writable primary objects?

   1. A. Refresh the secondary failover group from its source
   2. B. Increase the secondary failover group's refresh frequency
   3. C. Promote the secondary failover group to primary
   4. D. Add an account to the group's allowed target accounts

   Answer: C

   Explanation: The guide states, "When a secondary failover group is promoted to become the primary failover group, read-write access is available." Refreshing replicas, changing refresh frequency, or allowing additional targets does not perform that promotion.

   Reference: Introduction to replication and failover across multiple accounts — Replication groups and failover groups

7. 7An administrator repeatedly creates ordinary application tables while signed in with ACCOUNTADMIN. Which default-role change follows Snowflake's guidance for reducing this mistake?

   1. A. Set ACCOUNTADMIN as the default and disable secondary roles
   2. B. Set ORGADMIN as the default for application development
   3. C. Keep ACCOUNTADMIN as the default and grant PUBLIC ownership
   4. D. Assign an appropriate additional role and make it the default

   Answer: D

   Explanation: Snowflake advises, "do not make ACCOUNTADMIN the default role for any users in the system". An appropriate additional default role makes use of ACCOUNTADMIN an explicit choice; it does not prohibit role switching.

   Reference: Access control best practices — Avoid using the ACCOUNTADMIN role to create objects

8. 8An organization has an ORGADMIN-enabled regular account and needs an organization account. Which provisioning approach is supported?

   1. A. Convert the existing regular account into the organization account
   2. B. Use ORGADMIN in the existing account to create a separate organization account
   3. C. Rename the existing regular account to make it the organization account
   4. D. Grant GLOBALORGADMIN in the regular account to convert its account type

   Answer: B

   Explanation: Snowflake states, "You can’t convert an existing ORGADMIN-enabled account to be the organization account." The creation procedure says, "Execute the CREATE ORGANIZATION ACCOUNT command." Use ORGADMIN in an eligible existing account to create the separate account; renaming or role changes do not convert it.

   Reference: Organization accounts — Create the organization account > Considerations

9. 9For a standard multi-cluster warehouse in Auto-scale mode, minimizing query queuing takes priority over conserving credits. Which scaling-policy choice matches this objective?

   1. A. Economy, because it waits to keep running clusters fully loaded
   2. B. Economy, because it starts every cluster when the warehouse resumes
   3. C. Standard, because it favors starting clusters to reduce queuing
   4. D. Standard, because it fixes the running cluster count at the maximum

   Answer: C

   Explanation: Standard "Prevents/minimizes queuing by favoring starting additional clusters over conserving credits." Economy favors fuller existing clusters and can introduce queuing; neither policy turns Auto-scale into fixed Maximized mode.

   Reference: Multi-cluster warehouses — Setting the scaling policy for a multi-cluster warehouse > Standard

10. 10A Join operator produces vastly more rows than it consumes, although the report expects one matching row per key. Which issue should the administrator investigate first?

    1. A. A strict one-to-one key relationship between the join inputs
    2. B. Duplicate elimination that reduces the join's output row count
    3. C. A missing join condition or keys matching multiple rows
    4. D. Pruning of nonmatching rows before a one-to-one join

    Answer: C

    Explanation: For exploding joins, the guide says the operator "produces significantly (often by orders of magnitude) more tuples than it consumes." Missing conditions or multiple matches cause this pattern, so join predicates and key cardinality should be checked.

    Reference: Using Query Profile to analyze query performance — Common query problems > Exploding joins