Snowflake SnowPro Certification Practice Test

What feature of Snowflake enhances its disaster recovery capabilities?

1. Manual data backups

2. Automatic failover

3. Single point of failure

4. Data sharding

The correct answer is: Automatic failover

Automatic failover is a critical feature of Snowflake that significantly enhances its disaster recovery capabilities. This functionality allows the system to automatically switch operations from the primary data source to a standby instance in the event of a failure. When a disruption occurs—such as hardware malfunction, network issues, or other unforeseen incidents—automatic failover ensures minimal downtime and maintains business continuity. This feature is essential for organizations that require high availability and resilience in their data management solutions. By automatically rerouting workloads and processes to operational standby resources, Snowflake reduces the likelihood of data loss and operational interruption, which is vital in maintaining trust with users and clients relying on timely data access. The other options do not offer the same level of resilience. Manual data backups, while useful, require human intervention and can lead to potential data loss if not executed regularly or correctly. A single point of failure represents a risk that can lead to complete system outages, contrary to the goal of disaster recovery. Data sharding, which involves distributing data across multiple databases or tables to improve performance and scalability, does not inherently address disaster recovery concerns.