What happens to uncompressed files when staged in Snowflake by default?

• A. They are automatically compressed using gzip unless compression is explicitly disabled.
• B. Files are never compressed on staging.
• C. Compression is optional only for large files.
• D. Snowflake always compresses with zip.

Answer: (A)

When you stage files in Snowflake, uncompressed files are automatically compressed on the stage by default, using gzip. This happens with the PUT operation and is controlled by AUTO_COMPRESS (which is TRUE by default). The compression saves space on the stage and can speed up transfers. Snowflake will decompress these gzip files automatically when loading them with COPY INTO, so you don’t need to unzip first. If you want to keep files uncompressed on the stage, you can disable this behavior by setting AUTO_COMPRESS to FALSE. Zip is not used by default.