Answer: 256-512 MB

The correct answer is D (256-512 MB) based on Snowflake's official documentation and the strong community consensus. Multiple comments with high upvotes (4 upvotes each) reference the Snowflake documentation which explicitly states that for Parquet files in external tables, the recommended size range to optimize parallel scanning operations is 256-512 MB. This size range allows Snowflake to efficiently distribute scanning work across multiple compute nodes while avoiding the overhead of processing too many small files. Option C (100-250 MB) was mentioned in one comment but had fewer upvotes and referenced a different documentation section about general data loading considerations rather than the specific external table optimization guidance.

Author: LeetQuiz Editorial Team