You are developing a Snowpark Python application that needs to process data from a Kafka topic. The data is structured as Avro records. You want to leverage Snowpipe for ingestion and Snowpark DataFrames for transformation. What is the MOST efficient and scalable approach to integrate these components?
Correct Answer: D
Option D is generally the most efficient. Converting Avro to JSON before ingestion simplifies the integration with Snowpipe and Snowpark. Snowpipe is optimized for semi-structured data like JSON within a VARIANT column. Subsequently, Snowpark DataFrames can easily process the JSON data using built-in functions, avoiding the complexity and potential performance bottlenecks of UDFs (Option B) or custom connectors (Option A). Although Snowflake's function can work with variant data, operating on raw Avro data is not natively supported by Snowpipe without pre-processing or complex UDF logic. External functions (Option E) add another layer of complexity for data retrieval.