You've trained a sales forecasting model using Snowpark ML and want to deploy it within Snowflake for real-time predictions. You've decided to store the predictions directly in a Snowflake table. The model predicts sales for different product categories based on historical data and promotional activities. Which of the following approaches is the MOST efficient and scalable way to store these predictions, considering a high volume of prediction requests and the need for quick retrieval for downstream dashboards?
Correct Answer: B
Option B is the most efficient and scalable approach. Partitioning by product category allows for faster querying of specific categories. Clustering on the timestamp column ensures that recent predictions are quickly accessible. A composite key of product category and timestamp provides uniqueness. Option A lacks any optimization for querying. Option C can lead to performance issues with large JSON documents and querying specific values within the VARIANT. Option D introduces latency due to external stage access, and external tables are generally slower for frequent queries compared to native Snowflake tables. Option E introduces external dependency and network latency, which is generally not preferred if a native Snowflake solution is possible.