External tables can be used for query and join operations.

• A. False
• B. Partially true
• C. True
• D. Not specified

Answer: (C)

External tables let you treat data stored in external locations (like S3, Azure Blob, or Google Cloud Storage) as if it were a Snowflake table. Because of that, you can run queries against them and include them in joins with other tables, just like you would with data stored inside Snowflake. This makes it possible to analyze data lake data without loading it into Snowflake first, using a defined file format and stage to interpret the external files. Remember that external tables are read-only, so you’re querying the external data rather than modifying it, but you can combine it with internal tables or other external tables in complex SQL expressions. So the statement is accurate: external tables support query and join operations.