Free Databricks Databricks-Certified-Professional-Data-Engineer Practice Exam with Questions & Answers

Delta Lake, built on top of Parquet, enhances query performance through data skipping, which is based on the statistics collected for each file in a table. For tables with a large number of columns, Delta Lake by default collects and stores statistics only for the first 32 columns. These statistics include min/max values and null counts, which are used to optimize query execution by skipping irrelevant data files. When dealing with highly nested JSON structures, understanding this behavior is crucial for schema design, especially when determining which fields should be flattened or prioritized in the table structure to leverage data skipping efficiently for performance optimization.

https://docs.databricks.com/en/lakehouse/data-objects.html

 This is the correct answer because Delta Lake uses a transaction log to store metadata about each table, including min and max statistics for each column in each data file. The Delta engine can use this information to quickly identify which files to load based on a filter condition, without scanning the entire table or the file footers. This is called data skipping and it can improve query performance significantly. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Delta Lake” section; [Databricks Documentation], under “Optimizations - Data Skipping” section.

In the Transaction log, Delta Lake captures statistics for each data file of the table. These statistics indicate per file:

- Total number of records

- Minimum value in each column of the first 32 columns of the table

- Maximum value in each column of the first 32 columns of the table

- Null value counts for in each column of the first 32 columns of the table

When a query with a selective filter is executed against the table, the query optimizer uses these statistics to generate the query result. it leverages them to identify data files that may contain records matching the conditional filter.

For the SELECT query in the question, The transaction log is scanned for min and max statistics for the price column

The code creates a view called email_ltv that selects the email and ltv columns from a table called user_ltv, which has the following schema: email STRING, age INT, ltv INT. The code also uses the CASE WHEN expression to replace the email values with the string “REDACTED” if the user is not a member of the marketing group. The user who executes the query is not a member of the marketing group, so they will only see the email and ltv columns, and the email column will contain the string “REDACTED” in each row. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Lakehouse” section; Databricks Documentation, under “CASE expression” section.

The provided PySpark code performs the following operations:

Reads Data from silver_customer_sales Table:

The code starts by accessing the silver_customer_sales table using the spark.table method.

Groups Data by customer_id:

The .groupBy("customer_id") function groups the data based on the customer_id column.

Aggregates Data:

The .agg() function computes several aggregate metrics for each customer_id:

F.min("sale_date").alias("first_transaction_date"): Determines the earliest sale date for the customer.

F.max("sale_date").alias("last_transaction_date"): Determines the latest sale date for the customer.

F.mean("sale_total").alias("average_sales"): Calculates the average sale amount for the customer.

F.countDistinct("order_id").alias("total_orders"): Counts the number of unique orders placed by the customer.

F.sum("sale_total").alias("lifetime_value"): Calculates the total sales amount (lifetime value) for the customer.

Writes Data to gold_customer_lifetime_sales_summary Table:

The .write.mode("overwrite").table("gold_customer_lifetime_sales_summary") command writes the aggregated data to the gold_customer_lifetime_sales_summary table.

The mode("overwrite") specifies that the existing data in the gold_customer_lifetime_sales_summary table will be completely replaced by the new aggregated data.

Conclusion:

When this code is executed, it reads all records from the silver_customer_sales table, performs the specified aggregations grouped by customer_id, and then overwrites the entire gold_customer_lifetime_sales_summary table with the aggregated results. Therefore, option D accurately describes this process: "The gold_customer_lifetime_sales_summary table will be overwritten by aggregated values calculated from all records in the silver_customer_sales table as a batch job."

In Spark Structured Streaming, certain types of joins between a static DataFrame and a streaming DataFrame are not supported. Specifically, a right outer join where the static DataFrame is on the left side and the streaming DataFrame is on the right side is not valid. This is because Spark Structured Streaming cannot handle scenarios where it has to wait for new rows to arrive in the streaming DataFrame to match rows in the static DataFrame. The other join types listed (inner, left, and full outer joins) are supported in streaming-static DataFrame joins.

This is the correct answer because the code uses the dropDuplicates method to remove any duplicate records within each batch of data before writing to the orders table. However, this method does not check for duplicates across different batches or in the target table, so it is possible that newly written records may have duplicates already present in the target table. To avoid this, a better approach would be to use Delta Lake and perform an upsert operation using mergeInto. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Delta Lake” section; Databricks Documentation, under “DROP DUPLICATES” section.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/databricks/security/auth-authz/access-control/cluster-acl

https://docs.databricks.com/en/security/auth-authz/access-control/cluster-acl.html

This is the correct answer because it describes the behavior of Delta Lake Auto Compaction, which is a feature that automatically optimizes the layout of Delta Lake tables by coalescing small files into larger ones. Auto Compaction runs as an asynchronous job after a write to a table has succeeded and checks if files within a partition can be further compacted. If yes, it runs an optimize job with a default target file size of 128 MB. Auto Compaction only compacts files that have not been compacted previously. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Delta Lake” section; Databricks Documentation, under “Auto Compaction for Delta Lake on Databricks” section.

"Auto compaction occurs after a write to a table has succeeded and runs synchronously on the cluster that has performed the write. Auto compaction only compacts files that haven’t been compacted previously."

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/databricks/delta/tune-file-size