SnowPro Core (COF-C03) · Free practice question 14 of 15
Zero-copy cloning for QA environments
Your QA team needs a writable copy of a 500 GB production database for testing. They must not affect production data. Which approach is fastest and uses the least storage at creation time?
- A.Use `COPY INTO` to export production to S3, then `COPY INTO` a new QA database.
- B.Use `CREATE DATABASE qa CLONE prod;` (zero-copy clone).
- C.Replicate the database to a separate QA account.
- D.Open a Fail-Safe restore ticket asking Snowflake to recreate the database under a new name.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Use `CREATE DATABASE qa CLONE prod;` (zero-copy clone).
Why: Zero-copy cloning creates a metadata pointer to existing micro-partitions. The clone completes in seconds and uses no additional storage until the QA team writes (which creates new partitions only for the diverged data). Export/import duplicates everything; replication is for cross-region disaster recovery; Fail-Safe is not a self-service feature.
More free SnowPro Core (COF-C03) questions
- Micro-partition immutability
- SECURITYADMIN for user and role management
- Multi-cluster warehouses for concurrency
- Snowflake edition for extended Time Travel
- Recovering a truncated table with Time Travel
- Types of internal stages
- File sizing for COPY INTO
- Query result cache
- Reader accounts for non-Snowflake consumers
- LATERAL FLATTEN on VARIANT arrays
- Streams and tasks for change data capture
- Clustering keys for partition pruning
- Network policies for IP allowlisting
- Snowpipe auto-ingest for low latency