Snowflake SnowPro Certification 2025 – 400 Free Practice Questions to Pass the Exam

Temporary tables in Snowflake are designed specifically for short-term use within a user session. They are created to hold data that is only needed for the duration of the session where the table was created. Once the session ends, all data in the temporary table is automatically dropped, and the table itself is not accessible across different sessions. This makes temporary tables ideal for intermediate data processing tasks where you don’t need to keep the data after it is no longer needed.

In contrast, external tables are used to read data stored outside of Snowflake, transient tables are designed for durability with some level of persistence but without costs of long-term storage, and permanent tables are used for data that needs to persist indefinitely until explicitly dropped. Temporary tables, therefore, serve a specific purpose by being lightweight and session-bound, emphasizing their role in scenarios where rapid data handling is required without concern for long-term storage implications.