Microsoft Certified Data Analyst Associate Microsoft Azure Data Fundamentals 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which type of Azure Cosmos DB consistency level provides the strongest consistency guarantee?
- Eventual
- Session
- Bounded staleness
- Strong (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Strong
Strong consistency in Cosmos DB guarantees that reads always return the most recent committed write, at the cost of higher latency and limited to a single region.
Question 2: In Power BI, what is the difference between 'Import' and 'DirectQuery' storage modes?
- Import stores data in Power BI; DirectQuery queries the source live at report time (Correct answer)
- Import uses SQL; DirectQuery uses DAX
- Import supports real-time data; DirectQuery requires scheduled refresh
- Import is for cloud sources; DirectQuery is for on-premises only
Correct answer: Import stores data in Power BI; DirectQuery queries the source live at report time
In Import mode, data is copied and stored within Power BI's in-memory engine; in DirectQuery mode, every interaction queries the original data source in real time.
Question 3: What is the role of Azure Event Hubs in a real-time data architecture?
- Storing and indexing log files for search
- Ingesting high-throughput event streams from multiple producers (Correct answer)
- Running SQL queries over streaming data
- Managing schema evolution for Kafka topics
Correct answer: Ingesting high-throughput event streams from multiple producers
Azure Event Hubs is a big data streaming platform and event ingestion service capable of receiving millions of events per second from producers.
Question 4: Which Azure service enables you to run Apache Spark workloads for large-scale data engineering and machine learning?
- Azure SQL Managed Instance
- Azure Databricks (Correct answer)
- Azure Data Factory
- Azure Analysis Services
Correct answer: Azure Databricks
Azure Databricks is an Apache Spark-based analytics platform optimized for Azure, supporting data engineering, data science, and machine learning at scale.
Question 5: In the context of data modeling, what does 'cardinality' refer to?
- The number of tables in a schema
- The uniqueness of data values in a column relative to the total rows (Correct answer)
- The order in which tables are joined
- The compression ratio of stored data
Correct answer: The uniqueness of data values in a column relative to the total rows
Cardinality describes how unique the values in a column are — high cardinality means many unique values, while low cardinality means few distinct values.
Question 6: What is the primary purpose of Azure Purview (Microsoft Purview Data Catalog)?
- Encrypting data at rest across all Azure services
- Providing a unified data governance and data discovery service across the organization (Correct answer)
- Monitoring query performance in Azure SQL
- Orchestrating ETL pipelines across data sources
Correct answer: Providing a unified data governance and data discovery service across the organization
Microsoft Purview Data Catalog provides data discovery, classification, and governance capabilities, giving organizations a map of their data landscape.
Question 7: Which Azure storage option is most appropriate for storing billions of key-value pairs with very low latency and no complex query requirements?
- Azure SQL Database
- Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL
- Azure Table Storage (Correct answer)
- Azure Blob Storage
Correct answer: Azure Table Storage
Azure Table Storage is a simple, cost-effective NoSQL key-value store designed for storing massive amounts of structured, non-relational data with fast key-based lookups.
Microsoft Certified Data Analyst Associate Microsoft Azure Data Fundamentals 3
Which type of Azure Cosmos DB consistency level provides the strongest consistency guarantee?