A data engineering team uses Snowflake to analyze website clickstream data stored in AWS S3. The data is partitioned by year and month in the S3 bucket. They need to query the data frequently for reporting purposes but don't want to ingest the entire dataset into Snowflake due to storage costs and infrequent full dataset analysis. Which approach is the MOST efficient and cost-effective way to enable querying of this data in Snowflake?
Correct Answer: B
Using an external table pointing to the S3 bucket is the most efficient and cost-effective approach. It allows you to query the data directly in S3 without ingesting it into Snowflake, saving on storage costs. Partitioning metadata further optimizes query performance by allowing Snowflake to only scan relevant partitions based on the query criteria.