Databricks Databricks-Certified-Professional-Data-Engineer - Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional Exam

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/databricks/delta/vacuum

This is the correct answer because it is the maximum notebook permissions that can be granted to the user without allowing accidental changes to production code or data. Notebook permissions are used to control access to notebooks in Databricks workspaces. There are four types of notebook permissions: Can Manage, Can Edit, Can Run, and Can Read. Can Manage allows full control over the notebook, including editing, running, deleting, exporting, and changing permissions. Can Edit allows modifying and running the notebook, but not changing permissions or deleting it. Can Run allows executing commands in an existing cluster attached to the notebook, but not modifying or exporting it. Can Read allows viewing the notebook content, but not running or modifying it. In this case, granting Can Read permission to the user will allow them to review the production logic in the notebook without allowing them to make any changes to it or run any commands that may affect production data. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Databricks Workspace” section; Databricks Documentation, under “Notebook permissions” section.

This is the correct answer because Databricks has a feature called Auto Optimize, which automatically optimizes the layout of Delta Lake tables by coalescing small files into larger ones and sorting data within each file by a specified column. However, Auto Optimize also considers the trade-off between file size and merge performance, and may choose a smaller target file size to reduce the duration of merge operations, especially for streaming workloads that frequently update existing records. Therefore, it is possible that Auto Optimize has autotuned to a smaller target file size based on the characteristics of the streaming production job. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Delta Lake” section; Databricks Documentation, under “Auto Optimize” section. https://docs.databricks.com/en/delta/tune-file-size.html#autotune-table 'Autotune file size based on workload'

 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.

The approach that would simplify the identification of the changed records is to replace the current overwrite logic with a merge statement to modify only those records that have changed, and write logic to make predictions on the changed records identified by the change data feed. This approach leverages the Delta Lake features of merge and change data feed, which are designed to handle upserts and track row-level changes in a Delta table12. By using merge, the data engineering team can avoid overwriting the entire table every night, and only update or insert the records that have changed in the source data. By using change data feed, the ML team can easily access the change events that have occurred in the customer_churn_params table, and filter them by operation type (update or insert) and timestamp. This way, they can only make predictions on the records that have changed in the past 24 hours, and avoid re-processing the unchanged records.

The other options are not as simple or efficient as the proposed approach, because:

Option A would require applying the churn model to all rows in the customer_churn_params table, which would be wasteful and redundant. It would also require implementing logic to perform an upsert into the predictions table, which would be more complex than using the merge statement.

Option B would require converting the batch job to a Structured Streaming job, which would involve changing the data ingestion and processing logic. It would also require using the complete output mode, which would output the entire result table every time there is a change in the source data, which would be inefficient and costly.

Option C would require calculating the difference between the previous model predictions and the current customer_churn_params on a key identifying unique customers, which would be computationally expensive and prone to errors. It would also require storing and accessing the previous predictions, which would add extra storage and I/O costs.

Option D would require modifying the overwrite logic to include a field populated by calling spark.sql.functions.current_timestamp() as data are being written, which would add extra complexity and overhead to the data engineering job. It would also require using this field to identify records written on a particular date, which would be less accurate and reliable than using the change data feed.

References: Merge, Change data feed

This is the correct answer because it explains which of the following adjustments will get a more accurate measure of how code is likely to perform in production. The adjustment is that calling display() forces a job to trigger, while many transformations will only add to the logical query plan; because of caching, repeated execution of the same logic does not provide meaningful results. When developing code in Databricks notebooks, one should be aware of how Spark handles transformations and actions. Transformations are operations that create a new DataFrame or Dataset from an existing one, such as filter, select, or join. Actions are operations that trigger a computation on a DataFrame or Dataset and return a result to the driver program or write it to storage, such as count, show, or save. Calling display() on a DataFrame or Dataset is also an action that triggers a computation and displays the result in a notebook cell. Spark uses lazy evaluation for transformations, which means that they are not executed until an action is called. Spark also uses caching to store intermediate results in memory or disk for faster access in subsequent actions. Therefore, calling display() forces a job to trigger, while many transformations will only add to the logical query plan; because of caching, repeated execution of the same logic does not provide meaningful results. To get a more accurate measure of how code is likely to perform in production, one should avoid calling display() too often or clear the cache before running each cell. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Spark Core” section; Databricks Documentation, under “Lazy evaluation” section; Databricks Documentation, under “Caching” 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

In Databricks notebooks, you can use the %pip install command in a notebook cell to install a Python package. This will install the package on all nodes in the currently active cluster at the notebook level. It is a feature provided by Databricks to facilitate the installation of Python libraries for the notebook environment specifically.

The Databricks CLI provides a way to automate interactions with Databricks services. When dealing with pipelines, you can use thedatabricks pipelines get --pipeline-idcommand to capture the settings of an existing pipeline in JSON format. This JSON can then be modified by removing thepipeline_idto prevent conflicts and renaming the pipeline to create a new pipeline. The modified JSON file can then be used with thedatabricks pipelines createcommand to create a new pipeline with those settings.

References:

Databricks Documentation on CLI for Pipelines: Databricks CLI - Pipelines