SnowPro Advanced: Architect · Free practice question 8 of 10
Kafka ingestion
An Architect is choosing between Snowpipe and Snowpipe Streaming for a Kafka-based clickstream pipeline that generates roughly 20,000 events per second. End-to-end latency requirement is under 5 seconds. Which statement is correct?
- A.Use Snowpipe (file-based) because it has lower latency than Snowpipe Streaming.
- B.Use Snowpipe Streaming; it ingests rows directly with sub-second flush, meeting the 5-second SLA.
- C.Use Snowpipe with tiny 100 KB files rotated every second to approximate streaming.
- D.Use an external table over Kafka Connect's S3 sink and query directly.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Use Snowpipe Streaming; it ingests rows directly with sub-second flush, meeting the 5-second SLA.
Why: Snowpipe Streaming is built for row-level ingestion with sub-second flush semantics and is the Snowflake-native path when end-to-end latency must stay under a minute. File-based Snowpipe has a ~1-minute floor and generates excessive small-file overhead if you try to force it faster. External tables add per-query metadata refresh cost.