Snowflake SOL-C01 Exam - Topic 3 Question 7 Discussion

Unstructured data such as PDF files, images, and other binary documents is stored in stages in Snowflake. These stages may be internal stages, which Snowflake manages directly, or external stages, which reference external cloud storage such as Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google Cloud Storage. Stages are the designed mechanism for storing and accessing unstructured files so that they can be processed with functions like PARSE_DOCUMENT or accessed via directory tables.

External tables are used to query structured or semi-structured data (for example, Parquet or JSON) stored in external locations, not to store raw unstructured binary content. The Cloud Services layer coordinates metadata, security, and query services; it does not store user data. Tables with a single VARCHAR column might be used as an improvised approach for small text blobs, but this is not the native or recommended method for managing unstructured data at scale.

==================