DP-203 Azure Data Engineer Associate Azure Synapse Analytics 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What is the primary purpose of Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB?
- Migrating Cosmos DB data permanently to Azure SQL Database
- Enabling near real-time analytics on operational Cosmos DB data without ETL pipelines (Correct answer)
- Backing up Cosmos DB containers to Azure Blob Storage
- Replicating Cosmos DB data across Azure regions for disaster recovery
Correct answer: Enabling near real-time analytics on operational Cosmos DB data without ETL pipelines
Azure Synapse Link creates a tight integration between Cosmos DB's analytical store and Synapse Analytics, enabling zero-ETL near real-time analytics without impacting transactional performance.
Question 2: Which file format is NOT natively supported by Azure Synapse Analytics serverless SQL pools for querying data in Azure Data Lake Storage?
- Parquet
- CSV
- Avro (Correct answer)
- JSON
Correct answer: Avro
Serverless SQL pools natively support Parquet, CSV, JSON, and Delta Lake formats; Avro is not natively supported and requires additional workarounds.
Question 3: What is the primary use case for Apache Spark pools in Azure Synapse Analytics?
- Running T-SQL queries against dedicated SQL pool tables
- Providing serverless on-demand SQL queries for data exploration
- Running distributed data processing, transformation, and machine learning workloads (Correct answer)
- Managing and scheduling Synapse pipeline activities
Correct answer: Running distributed data processing, transformation, and machine learning workloads
Apache Spark pools provide a managed distributed computing environment supporting Python, Scala, R, and .NET for large-scale data processing and machine learning.
Question 4: What does the Delta Lake format primarily provide when used in Azure Synapse Analytics?
- Compressing Parquet files to reduce storage costs
- ACID transactions, schema enforcement, and time travel on data lake storage (Correct answer)
- Real-time streaming ingestion from Azure Event Hubs
- Metadata storage for external table definitions
Correct answer: ACID transactions, schema enforcement, and time travel on data lake storage
Delta Lake adds ACID transaction guarantees, schema enforcement, and time travel (data versioning) capabilities on top of Parquet files in Azure Data Lake Storage.
Question 5: What connector allows Apache Spark pools in Azure Synapse Analytics to efficiently read from and write to dedicated SQL pools?
- Azure Data Factory mapping dataflow
- Synapse Spark connector (azure-synapse-spark-connector) (Correct answer)
- PolyBase over JDBC
- Azure Synapse Link
Correct answer: Synapse Spark connector (azure-synapse-spark-connector)
The Synapse Spark connector uses a high-performance bulk load mechanism to efficiently move data between Spark pools and dedicated SQL pools within the same workspace.
Question 6: Which approach best optimizes query performance in Azure Synapse Analytics serverless SQL pools?
- Creating clustered columnstore indexes on external tables
- Using Parquet format with folder partitioning and creating table statistics (Correct answer)
- Scaling up DWUs to increase compute nodes
- Enabling result-set caching on the serverless endpoint
Correct answer: Using Parquet format with folder partitioning and creating table statistics
Parquet enables predicate and projection pushdown, folder-based partitioning eliminates unnecessary file reads via partition pruning, and statistics help the query optimizer choose efficient plans.
Question 7: Which Azure Synapse dedicated SQL pool feature stores query results so that subsequent identical queries return instantly without re-execution?
- Materialized views
- Result-set caching (Correct answer)
- Workload management queuing
- Columnstore segment elimination
Correct answer: Result-set caching
Result-set caching stores the complete output of a query and serves it from cache for identical subsequent queries, dramatically reducing latency for repeated analytical queries.
DP-203 Azure Data Engineer Associate Azure Synapse Analytics 2
What is the primary purpose of Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB?