A Data Engineer is building a data pipeline to ingest incremental data from a data source using streams and tasks in Snowflake. A stream is created on a CUSTOMER_RAW table to track the new records…

Question

Options

• AThe DESCRIBE STREAM for the stream will show the value of the STALE column as TRUE.
• BThe renaming will cause no disruption to the existing data pipeline.
• CThe DESCRIBE STREAM for the stream will show the value of the STALE column as FALSE.
• DThe TASK_HISTORY for the subsequent run will show an error after the renaming operation.

• A
  77% (27)
• B
  6% (2)
• C
  14% (5)
• D
  3% (1)

Explanation

When a Snowflake stream's source table is renamed, Snowflake can no longer resolve the original table reference, causing the stream to become stale - which is precisely what DESCRIBE STREAM will report as STALE = TRUE. A stale stream has lost its ability to track change data capture (CDC) offsets, rendering it unusable until re-created or the table name is restored.

Why the distractors are wrong:

• B is wrong because the rename absolutely causes disruption - the stream silently breaks rather than transparently following the rename.
• C is wrong because STALE = FALSE would indicate the stream is healthy; the opposite is true here.
• D is tempting but wrong as the primary outcome: the staleness is recorded on the stream object itself first, and while subsequent task runs may also fail, the most immediate and definitive consequence is the stale flag on the stream, not a task history error.

Memory tip: Think of a Snowflake stream as a "named bookmark" tied to an exact table name - rename the table and the bookmark no longer points anywhere valid, leaving it STALE = TRUE. Always drop and recreate streams when renaming source tables.

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