Partitioning an external table is a technique that improves the performance of queries executed against the table by reducing the amount of data scanned. Partitioning an external table involves creating one or more partition columns that define how the table is logically divided into subsets of data based on the values in those columns. The partition columns can be derived from the file metadata (such as file name, path, size, or modification time) or from the file content (such as a column value or a JSON attribute). Partitioning an external table allows the query optimizer to prune the files that do not match the query predicates, thus avoiding unnecessary data scanning and processing2

The other options are not effective steps for improving the performance of queries executed against an external table:

Shorten the names of the source files. This option does not have any impact on the query performance, as the file names are not used for query processing. The file names are only used for creating the external table and displaying the query results3

Convert the source files’ character encoding to UTF-8. This option does not affect the query performance, as Snowflake supports various character encodings for external table files, such as UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, ISO-8859-1, and Windows-1252. Snowflake automatically detects the character encoding of the files and converts them to UTF-8 internally for query processing4

Use an internal stage instead of an external stage to store the source files. This option is not applicable, as external tables can only reference files stored in external stages, such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage. Internal stages are used for loading data into internal tables, not external tables5 References:

1: SnowPro Advanced: Architect | Study Guide

2: Snowflake Documentation | Partitioning External Tables

3: Snowflake Documentation | Creating External Tables

4: Snowflake Documentation | Supported File Formats and Compression for Staged Data Files

5: Snowflake Documentation | Overview of Stages

: SnowPro Advanced: Architect | Study Guide

: Partitioning External Tables

: Creating External Tables

: Supported File Formats and Compression for Staged Data Files

: Overview of Stages