How to prepare for the new SnowPro Native Apps Specialist certification exam
On Oct 21 2024, Snowflake announced two new certifications, from a new “Specialty” category:
I’ve already been at their SnowPro Snowpark Specialist beta exam, and you can read here about my brand new Udemy course, practice tests and book. They can help!
I’ve also been at their “SnowPro Specialty: Native Apps” beta exam just a few days ago, so I can tell you more about it here. We’ll get the results 8 weeks after the window closes (by April 2025), as they need to figure out how to establish the passing score, out of the overall pool of people who tried these exams.
How was the exam
Pretty hard. Just like the Snowpark Specialty exam, but in a different manner. Unlike the Snowpark exam, this was not long scenario-based, with a lot of Python or SQL code, and very long questions.
But the Devil was in the details. You have to really know Native Apps in depth, to have had practical experience with the framework, to properly understand the many nuanced questions.
Just like for the Advanced exams, the SnowPro Core certification is a pre-requisite.
I also had 80 questions — almost all as multi-select and multi-choice — to be completed in less than 2 hours. I expect over a dozen questions have been unseeded, and in the live exam you may have around 65 questions, just like for the Advanced exams. With a passing score also around 75%. But — I repeat — this is just my personal assumption at this point…
I finished earlier than at the Snowpark exam, but just because the questions were shorter. Still be careful not to run out of time, because the answers are not so obvious. For typical single selections, out of the traditional four choices, I had to frequently think hard between at least two alternatives.
And I still think I got a lot of answers wrong. But it was an interesting experiment, I learned a lot…
What you should better prepare with
You must know very well Snowpark Container Services (SPCS) for this exam! You’ll have no question about SPCS at the Snowpark Specialty exam, but you will get a lot here ;)
Learn well all SQL statements related to application packages and application objects. Including image repositories, compute pools and services — for SPCS.
Learn well all functions from the Python Permission SDK, understand their signatures and their behavior in detail. Also how references work, plus all functions using references. Learn about callbacks!
Go deep into all possible settings in YAML configuration files, especially the manifest file and the container service specifications. The snowflake.yml project file is rather new and not included in this first iteration of the exam.
A lot of questions about granted privileges, a lot!
As expected, learn well about the version management. It’s not so obvious and — unless you get very familiar with it — you may get it wrong often.
You have a few special cases there that you have to properly understand:
- external access integrations with secrets;
- external tables and Apache Iceberg tables;
- external functions.
Another interesting subject is the telemetry. Go deep into event sharing, event definitions and event tables. Understand the difference between logging messages and tracing events.
You’ll have just Python and SQL code in this exam. So you don’t have to bother about Java, Scala, JavaScript or other languages, in case you wondered.
What can you use to prepare for the exam
So far, make sure you get the Study Guide and walk through all the links exposed there. Most of them are from their Snowflake documentation, but there are two important external links as well.
Using their doc is good, but not enough. I looked at some other existing material — like third-party books or courses — and most of them do not cover anything specific for this exam.
You 100% need practical experience, to build and deploy all sorts of Native Apps. A few questions at the exam ask you specifically about your screens in Snowsight! But this may be very time consuming. And the environment is distributed and pretty complex.
Snowpark Container Services, the private Data Exchange and the public Snowflake Marketplace are also commercial services. You cannot practice lots of things on a free Snowflake trial account. And you will have to use not just one paid Snowflake account, but maybe two: one as a provider, and the other one acting as a consumer.
To try and publish apps on the Marketplace comes with a gottcha: you need to get approved as a provider, and for your app, at almost every possible change or update. And an automated security scan will trigger once you try to set your package distribution as external.
My advice is to rather use the private Data Exchange. Just like the provider profile, this is a service that you must get approved, on a paid Snowflake account. But once you get it, you can create a second paid account, link it in the same “organization”, and play with these Native Apps.
What can I offer to help you out with
I decided to learn about and to try to pass these two new exams, because I also wanted to publish new stuff on Udemy about it, or as published books.
(1) I’ll come up very soon with a video course on Udemy about this exam.
(2) But a separate collection of 2 x 50 practice test questions is already published! With detailed answers, explanations and references. Get it here for a very special low price:
(3) With the published versions of the practice exams on Amazon, in Kindle e-book and paperback editions:
