Databricks-Certified-Professional-Data-Engineer Exam Dumps - Databricks Certification Questions and Answers

Delta Lake's Liquid Clustering is an advanced feature that improves query performance by dynamically clustering data without requiring costly compaction steps like traditional Z-ordering.

When performing writes to a Liquid Clustered table, some write operations automatically maintain clustering, while others do not.

Explanation of Each Option:

(A) spark.writestream.format('delta').mode('append') (Correct Answer)

Reason: Streaming writes (writestream) do not support Liquid Clustering because streaming data arrives in micro-batches.

Since Liquid Clustering needs efficient global reorganization of files, streaming append operations don't provide sufficient data volume at a time to be effectively clustered.

Delta Lake documentation states that Liquid Clustering is only supported for batch writes.

(B) CTAS and RTAS statements

Reason: CREATE TABLE AS SELECT (CTAS) and REPLACE TABLE AS SELECT (RTAS) are batch operations and can enforce Liquid Clustering.

These operations create or replace a table based on a query result, and since they are batch-based, Liquid Clustering applies.

(C) INSERT INTO operations

Reason: INSERT INTO is supported for Liquid Clustering because it is a batch operation.

While it may not be as efficient as MERGE or COPY INTO, clustering is applied upon execution.

(D) spark.write.format('delta').mode('append')

Reason: Batch append operations are supported for Liquid Clustering.

Unlike streaming append, batch writes allow the optimizer to re-cluster data efficiently.

Conclusion:

Since streaming append operations do not support Liquid Clustering, option (A) is the correct answer.

 This is the correct answer because it addresses the situation while minimally interrupting other teams in the organization without increasing the number of tables that need to be managed. The situation is that an aggregate table used by numerous teams across the organization will need to have a number of fields renamed, and additional fields will also be added, due to new requirements from a customer-facing application. By configuring a new table with all the requisite fields and new names and using this as the source for the customer-facing application, the data engineering team can meet the new requirements without affecting other teams that rely on the existing table schema and name. By creating a view that maintains the original data schema and table name by aliasing select fields from the new table, the data engineering team can also avoid duplicating data or creating additional tables that need to be managed. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Lakehouse” section; Databricks Documentation, under “CREATE VIEW” section.

This is the correct answer because it is where in the Spark UI one can diagnose a performance problem induced by not leveraging predicate push-down. Predicate push-down is an optimization technique that allows filtering data at the source before loading it into memory or processing it further. This can improve performance and reduce I/O costs by avoiding reading unnecessary data. To leverage predicate push-down, one should use supported data sources and formats, such as Delta Lake, Parquet, or JDBC, and use filter expressions that can be pushed down to the source. To diagnose a performance problem induced by not leveraging predicate push-down, one can use the Spark UI to access the Query Detail screen, which shows information about a SQL query executed on a Spark cluster. The Query Detail screen includes the Physical Plan, which is the actual plan executed by Spark to perform the query. The Physical Plan shows the physical operators used by Spark, such as Scan, Filter, Project, or Aggregate, and their input and output statistics, such as rows and bytes. By interpreting the Physical Plan, one can see if the filter expressions are pushed down to the source or not, and how much data is read or processed by each operator. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Spark Core” section; Databricks Documentation, under “Predicate pushdown” section; Databricks Documentation, under “Query detail page” section.

This is the correct answer because the query is using a GROUP BY clause on the sensor_id column, which means it will calculate the mean temperature for each sensor separately. The alert will trigger when the mean temperature for any sensor is greater than 120, which means at least one sensor had an average temperature above 120 for three consecutive minutes. The alert will stop when the mean temperature for all sensors drops below 120. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “SQL Analytics” section; Databricks Documentation, under “Alerts” section.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Exact extract: “Job clusters are created for a job run and terminate when the job completes.”

This is the correct answer because checkpointing is a critical feature of Structured Streaming that provides fault tolerance and recovery in case of failures. Checkpointing stores the current state and progress of a streaming query in a reliable storage system, such as DBFS or S3. Each streaming query must have its own checkpoint directory that is unique and exclusive to that query. If two streaming queries share the same checkpoint directory, they will interfere with each other and cause unexpected errors or data loss. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Structured Streaming” section; Databricks Documentation, under “Checkpointing” section.

The events are that a data engineer, User A, has promoted a new pipeline to production by using the REST API to programmatically create several jobs, and a DevOps engineer, User B, has configured an external orchestration tool to trigger job runs through the REST API. Both users authorized the REST API calls using their personal access tokens. The workspace audit logs are logs that record user activities in a Databricks workspace, such as creating, updating, or deleting objects like clusters, jobs, notebooks, or tables. The workspace audit logs also capture the identity of the user who performed each activity, as well as the time and details of the activity. Because these events are managed separately, User A will have their identity associated with the job creation events and User B will have their identity associated with the job run events in the workspace audit logs. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Databricks Workspace” section; Databricks Documentation, under “Workspace audit logs” section.

Maintaining data quality rules in a centralized Delta table allows for the reuse of these rules across multiple DLT (Delta Live Tables) pipelines. By storing these rules outside the pipeline's target schema and referencing the schema name as a pipeline parameter, the team can apply the same set of data quality checks to different tables within the pipeline. This approach ensures consistency in data quality validations and reduces redundancy in code by not having to replicate the same rules in each DLT notebook or file.

When joining a stream of advertisement impressions with a stream of user clicks, you want to minimize the state that you need to maintain for the join. Option A suggests using a left outer join with the condition that clickTime == impressionTime, which is suitable for correlating events that occur at the exact same time. However, in a real-world scenario, you would likely need some leeway to account for the delay between an impression and a possible click. It's important to design the join condition and the window of time considered to optimize performance while still capturing the relevant user interactions. In this case, having the watermark can help with state management and avoid state growing unbounded by discarding old state data that's unlikely to match with new data.

For this scenario where a one-TB JSON dataset needs to be converted into Parquet format without employing Delta Lake's auto-sizing features, the goal is to avoid unnecessary data shuffles and yet ensure optimal file sizes for the output Parquet files. Here’s a breakdown of why option A is most suitable:

Setting maxPartitionBytes: The spark.sql.files.maxPartitionBytes configuration controls the size of blocks that Spark reads from the data source (in this case, the JSON files) but also influences the output size of files when data is written without repartition or coalesce operations. Setting this parameter to 512 MB directly addresses the requirement to manage the output file size effectively.

Data Ingestion and Processing:

Ingesting Data: Load the JSON dataset into a DataFrame.

Applying Transformations: Perform any required narrow transformations that do not involve shuffling data (like filtering or adding new columns).

Writing to Parquet: Directly write the transformed DataFrame to Parquet files. The setting for maxPartitionBytes ensures that each part-file is approximately 512 MB, meeting the requirement for part-file size without additional steps to repartition or coalesce the data.

Performance Consideration: This approach is optimal because:

It avoids the overhead of shuffling data, which can be significant, especially with large datasets.

It directly ties the read/write operations to a configuration that matches the target output size, making it efficient in terms of both computation and I/O operations.

Alternative Options Analysis:

Option B and D: Involves repartitioning, which would trigger a shuffle of the data, contradicting the requirement to avoid shuffling for performance reasons.

Option C: Uses coalesce, which is less intensive than repartition but can still lead to uneven partition sizes and does not directly control the output file size as effectively as setting maxPartitionBytes.

Option E: Setting shuffle partitions to 512 doesn’t directly control the output file size for writing to Parquet and could lead to smaller files depending on the dataset's partitioning post-transformations.

References

Apache Spark Configuration

Writing to Parquet Files in Spark