Answer: Materialized view

The question asks which Snowflake object consumes credits for maintenance. Materialized views (option C) automatically maintain their data by refreshing when the underlying data changes, and this maintenance process consumes compute credits in Snowflake. Regular tables (A) and regular views (B) do not have automatic maintenance that consumes credits - tables only consume credits for DML operations and queries, while views are just logical definitions. Cached query results (D) leverage Snowflake's result cache, which does not incur additional credit costs for maintenance. The community discussion shows 100% consensus on answer C, with comments confirming that materialized view maintenance consumes credits, aligning with Snowflake documentation.

Author: LeetQuiz Editorial Team