Microsoft Implementing Data Engineering Solutions Using Azure Databricks Sample Questions:

1. You have an Azure Databricks workspace that contains an all-purpose cluster named Cluster1.
You need to configure Cluster1 to meet the following requirements:
- The cluster must scale up automatically when workloads increase.
- The cluster must scale down automatically when workloads decrease.
The solution must minimize costs.
Which two actions should you perform? Each correct answer presents part of the solution.
NOTE: Each correct selection is worth one point.

A) Configure Cluster1 to terminate after 30 minutes of inactivity.
B) Disable Photon acceleration.
C) Enable autoscaling for Cluster1.
D) Apply a compute policy that enables users to manage the cluster settings.
E) Specify a fixed number of workers.

2. Case Study 1 - Contoso, Inc.
Overview
Company Information
Contoso, Inc. is a renewable energy provider that operates solar and wind farms across North America.
Existing Environment
Azure Environment
Contoso has a single Azure Databricks workspace named Workspace1 in the West US Azure region. Workspace1 is enabled for Unity Catalog.
Workspace1 contains all-purpose clusters for both development and production workloads.
The company's Azure environment contains:
- In the West US, Central US, and East US Azure regions, Azure event hubs that stream telemetry data and an Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 account in each region for each hub
- A single Azure SQL database in the West US region that hosts enterprise resource planning (ERP) data
- An Azure Database for PostgreSQL server in the West US region that stores operational maintenance data Data Environment Contoso ingests the following operational and business data:
- Telemetry data: More than 40,000 IoT sensors across 28 sites emit JSON telemetry events every few seconds. Each site sends the events to the nearest event hub, which writes the data into the corresponding Data Lake Storage Gen2 account. These files frequently experience schema drift.
- Maintenance logs: Maintenance systems generate historical repair logs, daily incremental updates, technician notes, and unstructured attachments that are stored in the Data Lake Storage Gen2 accounts.
- Operational maintenance data: Structured operational maintenance data is stored on the Azure Database for PostgreSQL server.
- External weather data: Hourly weather forecasts are retrieved from a REST API and written to the Data Lake Storage Gen2 accounts.
- ERP data: Daily CSV extracts of 50 to 100 GB contain equipment metadata, work orders, and purchase order information.
Problem Statements
The company's existing analytics environment has several issues:
Ingestion
- Telemetry pipelines fall behind during peak loads.
- Telemetry ingestion fails when schema drift occurs.
- Streaming pipelines reprocess events after a pipeline restarts.
Compute
Production and development workloads run on the same all-purpose clusters.
Production and development workloads do NOT support autoscaling or workload isolation.
Governance
- The ERP data is duplicated across systems and development teams.
- Naming conventions are inconsistent across development teams, regions, and products.
- Ownership of the IoT sensors changes over time, and analysts must track the full history of the ownership.
- Occasionally, equipment manufacturers must correct data-entry mistakes in equipment names.
Historical values are NOT required.
Pipeline operations
- Pipelines lack resiliency, alerting, and centralized scheduling.
Requirements
Planned Changes
Contoso plans to implement the following changes:
- Implement scalable data pipeline orchestration.
- Create a managed analytics catalog in Unity Catalog.
- Implement a consistent approach to creating curated datasets.
- Establish a centralized governance model across ingestion, cleansed, and curated layers.
- Grant data engineers access to the ERP tables by using minimal development effort.
- Adopt a compute strategy that isolates production workloads and supports autoscaling.
- Adopt a slowly changing dimension (SCD) approach to address current data modeling issues.
Technical Requirements
Contoso identifies the following environment and compute requirements:
- Ensure that production ingestion workloads run on compute clusters that can scale automatically during telemetry spikes.
- Provide fast and consistent performance for business intelligence (BI) workloads.
- Prevent development activity from affecting production pipelines.
- Production ingestion workloads must run as scheduled, non-interactive pipelines rather than on shared interactive development clusters.
Contoso identifies the following data ingestion and processing requirements:
- Auto-scale ingestion pipelines to handle bursty workloads.
- Handle schema drift for the maintenance and telemetry data.
- Ingest file-based telemetry data by using minimal operational effort.
- Store all the ingested data in a format that supports incremental processing.
- Support the continuous ingestion of telemetry data from the event hubs by using exactly-once semantics.
- Support the ingestion of the structured maintenance data from the Azure Database for PostgreSQL server.
- Build a new telemetry pipeline that ingests raw events from the event hubs, cleanses the data, and publishes curated tables to Unity Catalog.
- Ensure that the Apache Spark Structured Streaming pipelines reading from the event hubs write the data into a managed Delta table named telemetry.raw_events. The pipelines must support schema drift and resume processing after failures without reprocessing the data.
Contoso identifies the following data modeling and optimization requirements:
- Build curated tables that standardize business logic.
- Overwrite equipment metadata attributes, such as name, manufacturer, model, and commissioning date, when the attributes change. Historical values are NOT required.
Contoso identifies the following pipeline deployment and operation requirements:
- Orchestrate multi-step ingestion and transformation workflows.
- Define a clear execution order and dependencies.
- Automatically retry failed steps and notify operators.
- Schedule ingestion and transformation workloads consistently.
Governance Requirements
Contoso identifies the following governance requirements:
- Centralize the metadata catalog.
- Provide isolated development areas that follow standard naming conventions.
- Establish a consistent structure for organizing raw, cleansed, and curated data.
- Provide a read-only mechanism to reference the ERP data through a foreign catalog.
Business Requirements
Contoso identifies the following business requirements:
- Improve ingestion reliability and reduce operational effort.
- Standardize data definitions across development teams.
You need to develop the task logic for a new job in Lakeflow Jobs that processes telemetry data.
Each task must contain only the appropriate logic for its step in the pipeline. The solution must support the planned changes and meet the data ingestion and processing requirements.
What should you do?

A) Create separate tasks for ingestion, cleansing, and curation.
B) Create three tasks that each contains the identical logic and use task retries.
C) Use a single SQL task that performs ingestion, cleansing, and curation by running merge commands.
D) Use a single Databricks notebook task that performs ingestion, cleansing, and curation in one script.

3. Which operation guarantees ACID compliance in Delta Lake?

A) Delta transaction log
B) INSERT OVERWRITE
C) Spark RDD transformation
D) Direct file append

4. Note: This section contains one or more sets of questions with the same scenario and problem. Each question presents a unique solution to the problem. You must determine whether the solution meets the stated goals. More than one solution in the set might solve the problem. It is also possible that none of the solutions in the set solve the problem.
After you answer a question in this section, you will NOT be able to return. As a result, these questions do not appear on the Review Screen.
You have an Azure Databricks workspace named Workspace1 that contains a lakehouse and is enabled for Unity Catalog.
You have a connection to a Microsoft SQL Server database named DB1.
You need to expose the schemas and tables of DB1 to meet the following requirements:
- The schemas and tables can be queried in Databricks.
- The schemas and tables appear alongside other Unity Catalog objects.
- The data is NOT copied into Databricks-managed storage.
Solution: You create a Databricks access connector.
Does this meet the goal?

A) Yes
B) No

5. A data engineer notices slow query performance on a large Delta table in Azure Databricks. The table has frequent updates and deletes. Which action best improves query performance?

A) Increase cluster size
B) Enable Delta caching only
C) Run OPTIMIZE and ZORDER BY on frequently filtered columns
D) Convert table to Parquet format

Solutions: