Databricks-Certified-Professional-Data-Engineer Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional Exam Question and Answers

In Databricks Lakehouse, to retain manually deleted or updated records in the raw_iot table while recomputing downstream tables when a pipeline update is run, the property pipelines.reset.allowed should be set to false. This property prevents the system from resetting the state of the table, which includes the removal of the history of changes, during a pipeline update. By keeping this property as false, any changes to the raw_iot table, including manual deletes or updates, are retained, and recomputation of downstream tables, such as bpm_stats, can occur with the full history of data changes intact.

References:

• Databricks documentation on DLT pipelines: https://docs.databricks.com/data-engineering/delta-live-tables/delta-live-tables-overview.html

This is the correct answer because it describes what will occur when this code is executed. The code uses three Delta Lake tables as input sources: accounts, orders, and order_items. These tables are joined together using SQL queries to create a view called new_enriched_itemized_orders_by_account, which contains information about each order item and its associated account details. Then, the code uses write.format(“delta”).mode(“overwrite”) to overwrite a target table called enriched_itemized_orders_by_account using the data from the view. This means that every time this code is executed, it will replace all existing data in the target table with new data based on the current valid version of data in each of the three input tables. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Delta Lake” section; Databricks Documentation, under “Write to Delta tables” section.

When a Databricks job runs multiple tasks with dependencies, the tasks are executed in a dependency graph. If a task fails, the downstream tasks that depend on it are skipped and marked as Upstream failed. However, the failed task may have already committed some changes to the Lakehouse before the failure occurred, and those changes are not rolled back automatically. Therefore, the job run may result in a partial update of the Lakehouse. To avoid this, you can use the transactional writes feature of Delta Lake to ensure that the changes are only committed when the entire job run succeeds. Alternatively, you can use the Run if condition to configure tasks to run even when some or all of their dependencies have failed, allowing your job to recover from failures and continue running. References:

• transactional writes: https://docs.databricks.com/delta/delta-intro.html#transactional-writes
• Run if: https://docs.databricks.com/en/workflows/jobs/conditional-tasks.html

In Delta Lake, a shallow clone creates a new table by copying the metadata of the source table without duplicating the data files. When the vacuum command is run on the source table, it removes old data files that are no longer needed to maintain the transactional log's integrity, potentially including files referenced by the shallow clone's metadata. If these files are purged, the shallow cloned tables will reference non-existent data files, causing them to stop working properly. This highlights the dependency of shallow clones on the source table's data files and the impact of data management operations like vacuum on these clones.References: Databricks documentation on Delta Lake, particularly the sections on cloning tables (shallow and deep cloning) and data retention with the vacuum command (https://docs.databricks.com/delta/index.html ).

This code is using the pyspark.sql.functions library to group the silver_customer_sales table by customer_id and then aggregate the data using the minimum sale date, maximum sale total, and sum of distinct order ids. The resulting aggregated data is then written to the gold_customer_lifetime_sales_summary table, overwriting any existing data in that table. This is a batch job that does not use any incremental or streaming logic, and does not perform any merge or update operations. Therefore, the code will overwrite the gold table with the aggregated values from the silver table every time it is executed. References:

• https://docs.databricks.com/spark/latest/dataframes-datasets/introduction-to-dataframes-python.html
• https://docs.databricks.com/spark/latest/dataframes-datasets/transforming-data-with-dataframes.html
• https://docs.databricks.com/spark/latest/dataframes-datasets/aggregating-data-with-dataframes.html

The error being raised is an AnalysisException, which is a type of exception that occurs when Spark SQL cannot analyze or execute a query due to some logical or semantic error1. In this case, the error message indicates that the query cannot resolve the column name ‘heartrateheartrateheartrate’ given the input columns ‘heartrate’ and ‘age’. This means that there is no column in the table named ‘heartrateheartrateheartrate’, and the query is invalid. A possible cause of this error is a typo or a copy-paste mistake in the query. To fix this error, the query should use a valid column name that exists in the table, such as ‘heartrate’. References: AnalysisException

This is the correct answer because it is the REST API call that can be used to review the notebooks configured to run as tasks in a multi-task job. The REST API is an interface that allows programmatically interacting with Databricks resources, such as clusters, jobs, notebooks, or tables. The REST API uses HTTP methods, such as GET, POST, PUT, or DELETE, to perform operations on these resources. The /jobs/get endpoint is a GET method that returns information about a job given its job ID. The information includes the job settings, such as the name, schedule, timeout, retries, email notifications, and tasks. The tasks are the units of work that a job executes. A task can be a notebook task, which runs a notebook with specified parameters; a jar task, which runs a JAR uploaded to DBFS with specified main class and arguments; or a python task, which runs a Python file uploaded to DBFS with specified parameters. A multi-task job is a job that has more than one task configured to run in a specific order or in parallel. By using the /jobs/get endpoint, one can review the notebooks configured to run as tasks in a multi-task job. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Databricks Jobs” section; Databricks Documentation, under “Get” section; Databricks Documentation, under “JobSettings” section.

With schema evolution enabled in Databricks Delta tables, when a new field is added to a record through a MERGE operation, Databricks automatically modifies the table schema to include the new field. In existing records where this new field is not present, Databricks will insert NULL values for that field. This ensures that the schema remains consistent across all records in the table, with the new field being present in every record, even if it is NULL for records that did not originally include it.

References:

• Databricks documentation on schema evolution in Delta Lake: https://docs.databricks.com/delta/delta-batch.html#schema-evolution

In Databricks and Delta Lake, transactions are indeed ACID-compliant, but this compliance is limited to single table transactions. Delta Lake does not inherently enforce foreign key constraints, which are a staple in relational database systems for maintaining referential integrity between tables. This means that when migrating workloads from a relational database system to Databricks Lakehouse, engineers need to reconsider how to maintain data integrity and relationships that were previously enforced by foreign key constraints. Unlike traditional relational databases where foreign key constraints help in maintaining the consistency across tables, in Databricks Lakehouse, the data engineer has to manage data consistency and integrity at the application level or through careful design of ETL processes.References:

• Databricks Documentation on Delta Lake: Delta Lake Guide
• Databricks Documentation on ACID Transactions in Delta Lake: ACID Transactions in Delta Lake

The correct answer is A. withWatermark(“event_time”, “10 minutes”). This is because the question asks for incremental state information to be maintained for 10 minutes for late-arriving data. The withWatermark method is used to define the watermark for late data. The watermark is a timestamp column and a threshold that tells the system how long to wait for late data. In this case, the watermark is set to 10 minutes. The other options are incorrect because they are not valid methods or syntax for watermarking in Structured Streaming. References:

• Watermarking: https://docs.databricks.com/spark/latest/structured-streaming/watermarks.html
• Windowed aggregations: https://docs.databricks.com/spark/latest/structured-streaming/window-operations.html

This is the correct answer because the JSON posted to the Databricks REST API endpoint 2.0/jobs/create defines a new job with a name, an existing cluster id, and a notebook task. However, it does not specify any schedule or trigger for the job execution. Therefore, three new jobs with the same name and configuration will be created in the workspace, but none of them will be executed until they are manually triggered or scheduled. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Monitoring & Logging” section; [Databricks Documentation], under “Jobs API - Create” section.

This is the correct answer because it meets the requirements of maintaining a full record of all values that have ever been valid in the source system and recreating the current table state with only the most recent value for each record. The code ingests all log information into a bronze table, which preserves the raw CDC data as it is. Then, it uses merge into to perform an upsert operation on a silver table, which means it will insert new records or update or delete existing records based on the change type and the pk_id columns. This way, the silver table will always reflect the current state of the source table, while the bronze table will keep the history of all changes. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Delta Lake” section; Databricks Documentation, under “Upsert into a table using merge” section.

Delta Lake's time travel feature allows users to access previous versions of a table, providing a powerful tool for auditing and versioning. However, using time travel as a long-term versioning solution for auditing purposes can be less optimal in terms of cost and performance, especially as the volume of data and the number of versions grow. For maintaining a full history of valid street addresses as they appear in a customers table, using a Type 2 table (where each update creates a new record with versioning) might provide better scalability and performance by avoiding the overhead associated with accessing older versions of a large table. While Type 1 tables, where existing records are overwritten with new values, seem simpler and can leverage time travel for auditing, the critical piece of information is that time travel might not scale well in cost or latency for long-term versioning needs, making a Type 2 approach more viable for performance and scalability.References:

• Databricks Documentation on Delta Lake's Time Travel: Delta Lake Time Travel
• Databricks Blog on Managing Slowly Changing Dimensions in Delta Lake: Managing SCDs in Delta Lake

This is the correct answer because it describes what will happen with new records that have the same event_id as an existing record when the query is executed. The query uses the INSERT INTO command to append new records from the view new_events to the table events. However, the INSERT INTO command does not check for duplicate values in the primary key column (event_id) and does not perform any update or delete operations on existing records. Therefore, if there are new records that have the same event_id as an existing record, they will be ignored and not inserted into the table events. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Delta Lake” section; Databricks Documentation, under “Append data using INSERT INTO” section.

"If none of the WHEN MATCHED conditions evaluate to true for a source and target row pair that matches the merge_condition, then the target row is left unchanged." https://docs.databricks.com/en/sql/language-manual/delta-merge-into.html#:~:text=If%20none%20of%20the%20WHEN%20MATCHED%20conditions%20evaluate%20to%20true%20for%20a%20source%20and%20target%20row%20pair%20that%20matches%20the%20merge_condition%2C%20then%20the%20target%20row%20is%20left%20unchanged .

Converting the data to Delta Lake may not improve query performance on free text fields with high cardinality, such as the review column. This is because Delta Lake collects statistics on the minimum and maximum values of each column, which are not very useful for filtering or skipping data on free text fields. Moreover, Delta Lake collects statistics on the first 32 columns by default, which may not include the review column if the table has more columns. Therefore, the junior data engineer’s suggestion is not correct. A better approach would be to use a full-text search engine, such as Elasticsearch, to index and query the review column. Alternatively, you can use natural language processing techniques, such as tokenization, stemming, and lemmatization, to preprocess the review column and create a new column with normalized terms that can be used for filtering or skipping data. References:

• Optimizations: https://docs.delta.io/latest/optimizations-oss.html
• Full-text search with Elasticsearch: https://docs.databricks.com/data/data-sources/elasticsearch.html
• Natural language processing: https://docs.databricks.com/applications/nlp/index.html

Option B correctly fills in the blank to meet the specified requirements. Option B uses the “cloudFiles.schemaLocation” option, which is required for the schema detection and evolution functionality of Databricks Auto Loader. Additionally, option B uses the “mergeSchema” option, which is required for the schema evolution functionality of Databricks Auto Loader. Finally, option B uses the “writeStream” method, which is required for the incremental processing of JSON files as they arrive in a source directory. The other options are incorrect because they either omit the required options, use the wrong method, or use the wrong format. References:

• Configure schema inference and evolution in Auto Loader: https://docs.databricks.com/en/ingestion/auto-loader/schema.html
• Write streaming data: https://docs.databricks.com/spark/latest/structured-streaming/writing-streaming-data.html

To validate that all records from the source are included in the derived table, creating a view that performs a left outer join between the validation_copy table and the report table is effective. The view can highlight any discrepancies, such as null values in the report table's key columns, indicating missing records. This view can then be referenced in DLT (Delta Live Tables) expectations for the report table to ensure data integrity. This approach allows for a comprehensive comparison between the source and the derived table.

References:

• Databricks Documentation on Delta Live Tables and Expectations: Delta Live Tables Expectations

This is the correct answer because it characterizes the general programming model used by Spark Structured Streaming, which is to treat a live data stream as a table that is being continuously appended. This leads to a new stream processing model that is very similar to a batch processing model, where users can express their streaming computation using the same Dataset/DataFrame API as they would use for static data. The Spark SQL engine will take care of running the streaming query incrementally and continuously and updating the final result as streaming data continues to arrive. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Structured Streaming” section; Databricks Documentation, under “Overview” section.

This is the correct answer because it efficiently updates the account current table with only the most recent value for each user id. The code filters records in account history using the last updated field and the most recent hour processed, which means it will only process the latest batch of data. It also filters by the max last login by user id, which means it will only keep the most recent record for each user id within that batch. Then, it writes a merge statement to update or insert the most recent value for each user id into account current, which means it will perform an upsert operation based on the user id column. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Delta Lake” section; Databricks Documentation, under “Upsert into a table using merge” section.

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.

https://www.databricks.com/blog/2020/08/31/introducing-the-databricks-web-terminal.html

The code is using %sh to execute shell code on the driver node. This means that the code is not taking advantage of the worker nodes or Databricks optimized Spark. This is why the code is taking longer to execute. A better approach would be to use Databricks libraries and APIs to read and write data from Git and DBFS, and to leverage the parallelism and performance of Spark. For example, you can use the Databricks Connect feature to run your Python code on a remote Databricks cluster, or you can use the Spark Git Connector to read data from Git repositories as Spark DataFrames.

The GRANT USAGE ON DATABASE prod TO eng command grants the eng group the permission to use the prod database, which means they can list and access the tables and views in the database. The GRANT SELECT ON DATABASE prod TO eng command grants the eng group the permission to select data from the tables and views in the prod database, which means they can query the data using SQL or DataFrame API. However, these commands do not grant the eng group any other permissions, such as creating, modifying, or deleting tables and views, or defining custom functions. Therefore, the eng group members are able to query all tables and views in the prod database, but cannot create or edit anything in the database. References:

• Grant privileges on a database: https://docs.databricks.com/en/security/auth-authz/table-acls/grant-privileges-database.html
• Privileges you can grant on Hive metastore objects: https://docs.databricks.com/en/security/auth-authz/table-acls/privileges.html

The DELETE operation in Delta Lake is ACID compliant, which means that once the operation is successful, the records are logically removed from the table. However, the underlying files that contained these records may still exist and be accessible via time travel to older versions of the table. To ensure that these records are physically removed and compliance with GDPR is maintained, a VACUUM command should be used to clean up these data files after a certain retention period. The VACUUM command will remove the files from the storage layer, and after this, the records will no longer be accessible.

When introducing a new aggregation or a change in the logic of a Structured Streaming query, it is generally necessary to specify a new checkpoint location. This is because the checkpoint directory contains metadata about the offsets and the state of the aggregations of a streaming query. If the logic of the query changes, such as including a new aggregation field, the state information saved in the current checkpoint would not be compatible with the new logic, potentially leading to incorrect results or failures. Therefore, to accommodate the new field and ensure the streaming job has the correct starting point and state information for aggregations, a new checkpoint location should be specified.

References:

• Databricks documentation on Structured Streaming: https://docs.databricks.com/spark/latest/structured-streaming/index.html
• Databricks documentation on streaming checkpoints: https://docs.databricks.com/spark/latest/structured-streaming/production.html#checkpointing

To create an external or unmanaged Delta Lake table, you need to use the EXTERNAL keyword in the CREATE TABLE statement. This indicates that the table is not managed by the catalog and the data files are not deleted when the table is dropped. You also need to provide a LOCATION clause to specify the path where the data files are stored. For example:

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE events ( date DATE, eventId STRING, eventType STRING, data STRING) USING DELTA LOCATION ‘/mnt/delta/events’;

This creates an external Delta Lake table named events that references the data files in the ‘/mnt/delta/events’ path. If you drop this table, the data files will remain intact and you can recreate the table with the same statement.

References:

• https://docs.databricks.com/delta/delta-batch.html#create-a-table
• https://docs.databricks.com/delta/delta-batch.html#drop-a-table

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

In Databricks notebooks, using the display() function triggers an action that forces Spark to execute the code and produce a result. However, Spark operations are generally divided into transformations and actions. Transformations create a new dataset from an existing one and are lazy, meaning they are not computed immediately but added to a logical plan. Actions, like display(), trigger the execution of this logical plan.

Repeatedly running the same code cell can lead to misleading performance measurements due to caching. When a dataset is used multiple times, Spark's optimization mechanism caches it in memory, making subsequent executions faster. This behavior does not accurately represent the first-time execution performance in a production environment where data might not be cached yet.

To get a more realistic measure of performance, it is recommended to:

• Clear the cache or restart the cluster to avoid the effects of caching.
• Test the entire workflow end-to-end rather than cell-by-cell to understand the cumulative performance.
• Consider using a representative sample of the production data, ensuring it includes various cases the code will encounter in production.

References:

• Databricks Documentation on Performance Optimization: Databricks Performance Tuning
• Apache Spark Documentation: RDD Programming Guide - Understanding transformations and actions

 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