Guide to Snowflake Certification
“Anyone who keeps learning, stays young” — Henry Ford
What is Snowflake?
Snowflake is a SAAS solution to cloud data warehousing. Snowflake’s unique architecture logically separates but natively integrates storage, computing, and services. You can enable virtually all your users and data workloads to access a single copy of your data without impacting performance. Snowflake abstracts the complexity of underlying cloud infrastructures (SAAS), allowing you to run your data solution seamlessly across multiple clouds and regions for a single and consistent experience. Collaborate securely across your business ecosystem. Access additional shared data sets and data services via Snowflake Data Marketplace and connect similarly with thousands of Snowflake customers that comprise the greater Data Cloud.
What is Snowflake SnowPro Core Certification ?
Snowflake SnowPro Core certification is like any other skill test. You have to prove your knowledge on snowflake both theoretical and hands-on. The examination consists of 100 question is the form of MCQ(multiple choice question) or MAQ(multiple answer question).
MCQ will always have one right answer and MAQ will have 2 or more than 2 answers for a single question. The questions will be based completely on snowflake software documentation.
· Number of Questions: 100
· Question Types: Multiple Select, Multiple Choice, True/False
· Time Limit: 120 minutes
· Languages: English & Japanese
· Registration Fee: $175 USD + 18% GST = around $209
· Passing Score: 80% +
· No Prerequisites as such
· Delivery Options: Proctored exams delivered onsite at Kryterion Testing Centers or via Webassessor’s online proctored environment.
Who are eligible for this Snowflake certifications?
In two words: No Prerequisites
However below qualifications are an added advantage.
Anybody from software engineering/IT professional background with specifically good knowledge in SQL and has been part of data warehousing related tasks in either on-premise or on any other cloud technologies are on an added advantage to start this snowflake journey. Knowledge of Java Script will be an added advantage as most of the UDF (user defined functions) and SP’s (Stored Procedures) are written in JS.
Apart from this, if anyone want to start fresh into IT and wants to begin with data warehousing or interested in data lake (dumping data from various sources into one place) creation and mostly wants to work in database technologies, this is a good start point as SAAS solutions like snowflake are definitely the future.
How to prepare for Snowflake SnowPro Core Certification?
There are some really good and descriptive courses available for less than $8 in udemy.
You can take anyone of them. My personal favorite is the one my Mr. Hamid Qureshi. (Non-Promotional)
Link: https://www.udemy.com/share/1024gCBUoec1hWRnw=/
Give the mock tests and that should be enough to make you prepare for the exam.
Link: https://www.udemy.com/share/102ooOBUoec1hWRnw=/
Then create a free tier account in snowflake and start doing the hands on from the course simultaneously as you progress with the course.
Link: https://signup.snowflake.com
Cloud service : Your choice (preferred is AWS)
Snowflake does provide snowflake university courses which are really good for understanding and getting the idea of how the questions will be in the main exam. Don’t forget to pass the final exam in the snowflake university mindtickle which consists of 30 questions. If you are lucky enough one can, get 1 or 2 questions common in the certification exam.
Link: https://snowflakeuniversity.mindtickle.com/login?login_challenge=730a70012eba47ef9b31be6feef9fa06
Last but very important and might also be exhaustive will be going through the whole software documentation. Except for the parts which talk about AWS Azure GCP integration, mostly all of it is very important. The “note” section in each of the chapters are to be carefully dealt with and try to remember them as most of the questions will be directly or indirectly be coming from them.
Link: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/index.html
Other Snowflake Hands-on Certifications that Snowflake offer for free of cost are :
You will find this after you log-in into the snowflake university mindtickle course.
· Badge Workshop 1: Data Warehousing
· Badge Workshop 2: Data Sharing
· Badge Workshop 3: Data Application Builders
Note:
There are no available proper dumps, I personally don’t believe in them as the whole point of the certifications will be gone. We should build a strong community of people, using dumps to just pass certifications are not the way to learn and grow.
How tough is snowflake snowpro certifications and how much time required to study for certification?
It is not a very tough examination, however having said that, please do not take is casually, snowflake tests almost all the syllabus and covers a very large portion of their product. Most importantly, every other quarter new thing is getting added to the snowflake as a new feature/enhancement, hence the exam has new questions almost every quarter. So going through the latest documentation is a must and going through the mindtickle course as mentioned above. The cutoff is a bit high (80%+) hence one should sit down and study dedicatedly for at least for 2 weeks (2 hours each day).
Note:
People with SQL/cloud data warehousing background will require less time as they will find many things similar like syntaxes and few cloud concepts.
What is the relevance of snowflake certification and what is the current job market scenario?
Snowflake has taken the IT industry by storm, after they went IPO last year on NASDAQ, more than 100 of the fortune 500 companies have started to migrate to snowflake cloud data warehousing solution. The decoupled architecture of shared data where compute and storage are completely different, and they charge very less as the storage happens in a compressed columnar format has lured organizations to take their bite of snowflake. Few first-class snowflake objects which are also serverless like Snowpipe and Clustering keys has huge implementation in day-to-day life. Even executing python scripts to move data into snowflake has a huge impact on how we use ELT (extract load transform) tools.
This is an amazing technology to start with and has a long career in this as the product enhances itself more and more. New products such as SnowSight is coming which will help with analytics directly on the data on snowflake which makes it a complete package for data analytics. The product is getting more and more features and it will have a huge boom in future.
Conclusion
Snowflake is a product which has taken the industry with a storm because of its unique features in much cost-effective way. The certification will strengthen your product knowledge and make you ready for the huge job market that is slowly getting created.
I hope this article has helped you and please connect with me on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/soumakdas/) for any doubt.
Best of luck for the certification exam.
PS: All information are taken from https://www.snowflake.com which are copyrighted to Snowflake Inc.
