Snowflake SnowPro Advanced - Administrator Certification Exam Syllabus

Snowflake Security, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and User Administration : 30-35%

• Implement federated authentication/SSO as it relates to Snowflake
• Configure an Identity Provider (IdP) for Snowflake
• Configure, use, and manage federated authentication with Snowflake

- Implement Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

• Enroll a Snowflake user in MFA
• Use MFA with different Snowflake drivers and connectors (such as, Web UI, SnowSQL, JDBC, ODBC, etc.)
• Monitor users who do not have MFA enabled
• ​Reset passwords and temporarily disable or permanently remove MFA from a user

• Configure and manage network policies
• Describe network policy behavior when both account-level and user-level network policies exist

- Establish private connectivity to Snowflake internal stages

• Implement and manage cloud provider interfaces and private endpoints for internal stages

- Establish private connectivity to the Snowflake service

• Implement and manage private connectivity between cloud providers and Snowflake

- Access the Snowflake SQL API
- Use IP address allowed lists and blocked lists for access using network access policies

• Describe SCIM and its use cases as they relate to Snowflake
• Manage users and groups with SCIM
• Enable, configure, and manage SCIM integration

- Prevent data exfiltration with PREVENT_UNLOAD_TO_INLINE_URL and REQUIRE_STORAGE_INTEGRATION _FOR_STAGE_CREATION
- Manage service accounts, API integration, and automated authentication (for example, key pair authentication)

• Discretionary Access Control (DAC)
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

- Describe the uses for, and hierarchy of, system-defined roles
- Use cases for custom security roles
- Demonstrate key concepts of access control
- Describe the implications of role inheritance when granting or revoking privileges
- Describe the enforcement model
- Demonstrate how to grant access to specific objects within a database that requires privilege inheritance

• Create and name an organization
• Name various types of organization accounts
• Identify what regions are available for a given organization

- Understand account tasks

• View, create, and list accounts
• Change account names
• Enable replication for accounts

- Manage Tri-Secret Secure
- Manage encryption keys in Snowflake

• Describe how Snowflake encrypts customer data
• Describe encryption key rotation and periodic rekeying configuration

• Implement and manage column-level security using masking policies
• Use external tokenization to protect Personal Identifiable Information (PII)
  1. Describe the differences between data masking and external tokenization

- Implement and manage row access policies

• Configure a row access policy on an object
• Compare row access policies to secure views

- Perform auditing of access history

• Audit access history details using the access history views

- Use tagging and classification in Snowflake

• Identify use cases where tagging would be beneficial
• Implement and manage tagging
• Implement tag-based masking policies
• Implement data classification (EXTRACT_SEMANTIC_CATEGORIES, ASSOCIATE_SEMANTIC_CATEGORIES)

• Use Snowsight dashboards to monitor activity
• Share worksheets and dashboards
• Generate and share Snowsight charts

• Use SnowSQL
• Use Snowsight

- Create, manage, and maintain Snowflake internal and external stages

• Data exfiltration, storage integrations, etc.

• Schedule tasks
• Permissions required for creating and executing tasks
• Troubleshoot task historical runs

- Outline Snowflake-managed (serverless) tasks and associated use cases
- Outline streams and associated use cases

• Create, monitor, and consume streams
• Describe how data retention configuration affects usage of streams

• Describe use cases and benefits
• Describe, establish, and maintain a scaling policy
• Monitor multi-cluster warehouses

• Describe the components of the Query Profile:
  1. Steps
  2. Operator tree
  3. Operator nodes
  4. Operator types
• Compare compile versus runtime optimizations
• Identify/create efficient queries
  1. Articulate the execution path
  2. Use effective joining condition
  3. Perform grouping, sorting, and ordering
• Troubleshoot common query performance issues
• If data spilling is present, describe its impact and remediation tactics
• If data pruning is not occuring, describe its impact and remediation tactics
• Describe the various timeout parameters

• Abort transactions

• Set up notifications for resource monitors

• Create and enable cluster keys
  1. Outline a methodology for explicit clustering
• Use the automatic clustering service
  1. Monitor and assess usage
• Follow best practices for clustering
  1. Lowest cardinality column first
  2. Fewer columns is generally better
  3. Verify table scan is the problem - otherwise a cluster key will not help

- Describe micro-partitions, their benefits, and their impact
- Retrieve clustering information (depth, ratio, and histogram)

• Describe the differences between account_usage and organization_usage
• Monitor accounts and usage on the organization level
  1. Use the ORGANIZATION_USAGE schema in the SNOWFLAKE shared database
• Monitor and calculate data transfer costs
• Monitor and calculate data replication costs

- Forecast and monitor costs and pricing

• Enable resource monitor notifications
• Determine when warehouses should be suspended or resumed based on cost and pricing

- Describe the use cases for the account_usage and information_schema

• Views available from the information_schema
• Latency and data retention considerations

- Monitor and calculate data storage usage/credit
- Monitor and calculate warehouse usage/credits

• Demonstrate cost saving strategies
• Use resource monitors

- Describe how Snowflake credits are consumed by the cloud services layer (such as Snowpipe, materialized views, and automatic clustering
- Apply techniques for cost optimization

• Types of sharing (such as one to one/one to many, private exchange, Snowflake Marketplace)
• Sharing among different editions of Snowflake
• Sharing cross-regions or cross-clouds
  1. The role of replications
  2. Cross-cloud auto fulfillment for listings
• Configure data sharing programmatically
  1. Share different types of data objects including secure functions
  2. Describe the role of context functions in data sharing

• Create, manage, and maintain an outbound data share
• Share objects securely in a data share (for example, what type to use)
• Use secure objects to share data
  1. Secure views
  2. Secure User-defined Functions (UDFs)
• Create, manage and maintain readers accounts
  1. Create user and role for access
  2. Create resource monitors
  3. Create objects
  4. Determine if there is a need to store data (CREATE DATABASE)
• Import, manage, and maintain inbound data shares

• Create, edit, or delete provider profiles

• Publish, edit, unpublish, or republish data listings

• Request access to a Snowflake Marketplace listing (as a consumer)

- Request that new data or a data provider be added to the Snowflake Marketplace

• Create and manage data provider profiles
• Create, submit, manage, and modify a data listing

- Manage listing requests

• View and manage pending listing requests

- Manage data listings
- Monitor data sharing usage

• Replicate data to a lower Snowflake edition

- Describe the limitations of database replications
- Outline the implications of database replications (for example, billing
- Outline database replications considerations for:

• Automatic clustering
• Materialized views
• External tables
• Policies (masking and row access)
• Table streams
• Tasks
• Stages (internal and external)
• Access controls
• Historical usage data
• Tags
• Pipes
• Cloned objects

- Perform replication across multiple accounts
- Outline the impact of failing-over databases across multiple accounts
- Redirect client connections in case of fail-over
- Design and implement disaster recovery and business continuity plans

• What is database failover or failback?
• Awareness of cost implications

- Implement backup best practices in Snowflake