A company has an external vendor who puts data into Google Cloud Storage.

The most efficient way to load data from the vendor into Snowflake is to create an external stage on Google Cloud Storage and use the external table to load the data into Snowflake (Option B). This way, you can avoid copying or moving the data across different cloud platforms, which can incur additional costs and latency. You can also leverage the external table feature to query the data directly from Google Cloud Storage without loading it into Snowflake tables, which can save storage space and improve performance. Option A is not efficient because it requires the vendor to create a Snowflake account and a data share, which can be complicated and costly. Option C is not efficient because it involves copying the data from Google Cloud Storage to Azure Blob storage using external tools, which can be slow and expensive. Option D is not efficient because it requires creating a Snowflake account in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), ingesting data into this account, and using data replication to move the data from GCP to Azure, which can be complex and time-consuming. References: The answer can be verified from Snowflake’s official documentation on external stages and external tables available on their website. Here are some relevant links:

Using External Stages | Snowflake Documentation

Using External Tables | Snowflake Documentation

Loading Data from a Stage | Snowflake Documentation