Snowflake Administrator Interview Questions and Answers

Description

• Snowflake Administrator Overview
  1. Role summary: A Snowflake Administrator configures, secures, and maintains the Snowflake data platform to ensure reliable, performant, and cost‑effective data operations.
  2. Account setup: They create and organize accounts, warehouses, databases, and schemas, establishing the initial environment layout.
  3. User and role management: Administrators implement RBAC (roles, grants, and role hierarchies) to control access and enforce least privilege.
  4. Authentication and security: They configure SSO, multi‑factor authentication, network policies, and encryption settings to protect data in transit and at rest.
  5. Resource management: Admins provision and size virtual warehouses, set auto‑suspend/resume, and manage concurrency to balance performance and cost.
  6. Cost governance: They monitor credits, set budgets, tag resources, and apply policies to control spend and optimize usage.
  7. Data ingestion and objects: Administrators oversee stages, pipes, file formats, and external integrations for reliable data loading and unloading.
  8. Performance tuning: They analyze query profiles, cluster keys, micro‑partitioning, and warehouse sizing to reduce latency and improve throughput.
  9. Monitoring and observability: Admins configure alerts, resource monitors, and usage dashboards to detect anomalies and enforce SLAs.
  • Backup and recovery: They implement data retention, Time Travel, and Failover/Failback strategies to meet RTO/RPO requirements.
  • Data governance: Administrators collaborate on catalogs, masking policies, and lineage to support compliance and data stewardship.
  • Automation and IaC: They automate provisioning, grants, and deployments using scripts, Terraform, or CI/CD pipelines for repeatable operations.
  • Advanced security features: Admins enable dynamic data masking, row access policies, and external tokenization for fine‑grained protection.
  • Cross‑cloud and multi‑region: They design replication, database replication, and failover across regions or clouds for resilience and locality.
  • Integration with ecosystem: Administrators connect Snowflake to ETL/ELT tools, BI platforms, data catalogs, and streaming systems.
  • Audit and compliance: They maintain audit logs, access reports, and compliance artifacts to satisfy regulatory and internal audits.
  • Continuous improvement: Senior admins lead capacity planning, cost reviews, and platform upgrades while mentoring teams on best practices.