The Snowflake multi-cluster shared data architecture separates compute and storage, enablingindependent scaling of each. Compute resources (virtual warehouses) operate independently from the centralized storage layer, allowing users to increase compute power without impacting storage costs—or vice versa. This flexibility provides major advantages for cost optimization and workload performance tuning.

The architecture also supportsnear-unlimited concurrency and elasticity. When many users or workloads run simultaneously, Snowflake can automatically add additional clusters to a multi-cluster warehouse, ensuring that no queries experience queuing or performance degradation. This capability is crucial for BI dashboards, ETL pipelines, and large organizations with varied usage patterns.

Columnar storage (option D) is indeed a Snowflake feature but is not unique to the multi-cluster architecture. Enhanced security arrives via Snowflake’s platform-wide mechanisms, not specifically because of multi-cluster architecture. Unstructured data loading (option B) is also not governed by multi-cluster behavior.

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