Snowflake Exam ADA-C01 Topic 7 Question 18 Discussion

According to the Snowflake documentation1, a transient table is a type of table that does not support Time Travel or Fail-safe, which means that it does not incur any storage costs for maintaining historical versions of the data or backups for disaster recovery. A transient table can be dropped at any time, and the data is not recoverable. A transient table can also have a retention time of 0 days, which means that the data is deleted immediately after the table is dropped or truncated. Therefore, creating the staging table as a transient table with a retention time of 0 days can minimize the storage costs and maximize the performance, as the data is only loaded and transformed once, and then deleted after the production tables are populated. Option A is incorrect because creating the staging table as an external table, which references data files stored in a cloud storage location, can incur additional costs and complexity for data transfer and synchronization, and may not provide the best performance for data loading and transformation. Option C is incorrect because creating the staging table as a temporary table, which is automatically dropped when the session ends or the user logs out, can cause data loss or inconsistency if the session is interrupted or terminated before the production tables are populated. Option D is incorrect because creating the staging table as a permanent table, which supports Time Travel and Fail-safe, can incur additional storage costs for maintaining historical versions of the data and backups for disaster recovery, and may not provide the best performance for data loading and transformation.