You are tasked with creating a SQL UDF in Snowflake to mask sensitive customer data (email addresses) before it's used in a reporting dashboard. The masking should replace all characters before the '@' symbol with asterisks, preserving the domain part. For example, '
[email protected]' should become ' @example.com'. Which of the following SQL UDF definitions correctly implements this masking logic, while minimizing the impact on Snowflake compute resources?

Correct Answer: A
Option A correctly uses LPAD and SPLIT PART to replace the username portion of the email with asterisks while retaining the domain. It efficiently avoids unnecessary calculations or regular expressions. Option B is incorrect because it simply replaces everything before the @ with ' @', which is not dynamic. Option C's logic is flawed and would not mask correctly. Option D provides additional casing for when an email doesn't have '@' symbol, which is technically correct for handling unexpected input, but is not needed for the explicit requirement. Option E has incorrect syntax. This question assesses understanding of string manipulation functions and their optimal usage within a UDF.