Which statement describes Delta Lake Auto Compaction?
Correct Answer:E
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
A Structured Streaming job deployed to production has been experiencing delays during peak hours of the day. At present, during normal execution, each microbatch of data is processed in less than 3 seconds. During peak hours of the day, execution time for each microbatch becomes very inconsistent, sometimes exceeding 30 seconds. The streaming write is currently configured with a trigger interval of 10 seconds.
Holding all other variables constant and assuming records need to be processed in less than 10 seconds, which adjustment will meet the requirement?
Correct Answer:E
The adjustment that will meet the requirement of processing records in less than 10 seconds is to decrease the trigger interval to 5 seconds. This is because triggering batches more frequently may prevent records from backing up and large batches from causing spill. Spill is a phenomenon where the data in memory exceeds the available capacity and has to be written to disk, which can slow down the processing and increase the execution time1. By reducing the trigger interval, the streaming query can process smaller batches of data more quickly and avoid spill. This can also improve the latency and throughput of the streaming job2.
The other options are not correct, because:
✑ Option A is incorrect because triggering batches more frequently does not allow idle executors to begin processing the next batch while longer running tasks from previous batches finish. In fact, the opposite is true. Triggering batches more frequently may cause concurrent batches to compete for the same resources and cause contention and backpressure2. This can degrade the performance and stability of the streaming job.
✑ Option B is incorrect because increasing the trigger interval to 30 seconds is not a good practice to ensure no records are dropped. Increasing the trigger interval means that the streaming query will process larger batches of data less frequently, which can increase the risk of spill, memory pressure, and timeouts12. This can also increase the latency and reduce the throughput of the streaming job.
✑ Option C is incorrect because the trigger interval can be modified without modifying the checkpoint directory. The checkpoint directory stores the metadata and state of the streaming query, such as the offsets, schema, and configuration3. Changing the trigger interval does not affect the state of the streaming query, and does not require a new checkpoint directory. However, changing the number of shuffle partitions may affect the state of the streaming query, and may require a new checkpoint directory4.
✑ Option D is incorrect because using the trigger once option and configuring a Databricks job to execute the query every 10 seconds does not ensure that all backlogged records are processed with each batch. The trigger once option means that the streaming query will process all the available data in the source and then stop5. However, this does not guarantee that the query will finish processing within 10 seconds, especially if there are a lot of records in the source. Moreover, configuring a Databricks job to execute the query every 10 seconds may cause overlapping or missed batches, depending on the execution time of the query.
References: Memory Management Overview, Structured Streaming Performance Tuning Guide, Checkpointing, Recovery Semantics after Changes in a Streaming Query, Triggers
Which REST API call can be used to review the notebooks configured to run as tasks in a multi-task job?
Correct Answer:D
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.
A table is registered with the following code:
Both users and orders are Delta Lake tables. Which statement describes the results of querying recent_orders?
Correct Answer:B
A data pipeline uses Structured Streaming to ingest data from kafka to Delta Lake. Data is being stored in a bronze table, and includes the Kafka_generated timesamp, key, and value. Three months after the pipeline is deployed the data engineering team has noticed some latency issued during certain times of the day.
A senior data engineer updates the Delta Table's schema and ingestion logic to include the current timestamp (as recoded by Apache Spark) as well the Kafka topic and partition. The team plans to use the additional metadata fields to diagnose the transient processing delays:
Which limitation will the team face while diagnosing this problem?
Correct Answer:A
When adding new fields to a Delta table's schema, these fields will not be retrospectively applied to historical records that were ingested before the schema change. Consequently, while the team can use the new metadata fields to investigate transient processing delays moving forward, they will be unable to apply this diagnostic approach to past data that lacks these fields.
References:
✑ Databricks documentation on Delta Lake schema management: https://docs.databricks.com/delta/delta-batch.html#schema-management
In order to facilitate near real-time workloads, a data engineer is creating a helper function to leverage the schema detection and evolution functionality of Databricks Auto Loader. The desired function will automatically detect the schema of the source directly, incrementally process JSON files as they arrive in a source directory, and automatically evolve the schema of the table when new fields are detected.
The function is displayed below with a blank:
Which response correctly fills in the blank to meet the specified requirements?
Correct Answer:B
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