Intense week at the Nimbus Academy.
Last Monday we were notified that by Friday we would have taken the exam to obtain the SnowPro Core certification. First reaction: shock.

Why so? Well, Snowflake’s SnowPro Core is a 2-hour exam consisting of 100 questions that test all the fundamentals plus some advanced knowledge of Snowflake in both implementation and migration. Passing it, an individual proves that it has a thorough understanding of Snowflake’s Data Cloud. With that, the knowledge necessary to design, develop and manage secure, scalable Snowflake solutions to drive business objectives.

Being in the process of training to become future analytics engineers and Snowflake consultants for The Information Lab, let’s say this certification is practically a must-have.

Only three days to cover all the topics mentioned inside the Snowflake documentation, that you can find better described in the official page. Only three nights to study before the scheduled online proctored exam. How to do so?

Quick jump to the end of this story: we managed to succeed in this heroic feat!
I will tell you all the steps that I followed and I hope this guide will provide you with some information that could help you pass the exam as well.

Exam Guide

Besides all the material we were provided with by the Nimbus Intelligence Academy and the book “Snowflake, the definitive guide” by Joyce Kay Avila, I found that some helpful material are the Snowflake official guide for the exam and the cheat sheets created by Jeno Yamma.

Snowsight

Of extreme importance is to sign up for the free trial, which gives everybody the chance to get some hands-on experience. Snowflake allows you free credits for an equivalent of $400 to use and an Enterprise edition. Try to practice on every topic that is needed to know to pass the exam. Here’s a tip, try executing all the commands with SQL instead of using the web UI (database creation, named stage, warehouse, etc).

Practice tests

I have used the following links to find questions to practice for the exam. With different words, some of them ended up being in the actual exam!
My advice is to go through them all: like the official test, they won’t take you too long and they are all free!

Here’s in total something around 1000 questions:

https://www.fullcertified.com/certification/snowflake-snowpro-core
https://plazagonzalo.medium.com/snowflake-snowpro-core-practice-exam-c1e71abcdab0
https://www.examtopics.com/exams/snowflake/snowpro-core/view/1/

And if this is not enough, try Udemy! I have found 6 prep-tests with an average of 90 questions each. It really depends on how many mock exams you feel you need to have tried before doom’s day!

Finally: an advice from the heart

Don’t think too much!
There is plenty of time but trust your first gut! Every question has multiple choices and one will always feel more right than the others. Pick it and move on.
If you’re really stuck on a question: answer randomly, flag it and review it later. In most cases, a few more future questions will give you the answer to that question, or a strong hint to it.

Best of luck!

Want to know about the others’ experience as well? Be sure to check our blog.