Answer: Query execution

The correct answer is C (Query execution) because virtual warehouses in Snowflake are compute clusters specifically designed to execute SQL queries and process data. The community discussion with high upvotes confirms this, explaining that virtual warehouses handle query execution while other components manage infrastructure, metadata, query optimization, and permanent storage. Options A, B, D, and E are incorrect as they represent responsibilities of other Snowflake components: infrastructure management is handled by Snowflake's cloud services layer, metadata management is part of the cloud services, query parsing and optimization occurs before execution in the services layer, and permanent storage of micro-partitions is managed by the storage layer.

Author: LeetQuiz Editorial Team