Free Practice Questions for Databricks Databricks-Certified-Professional-Data-Engineer Exam

Metastore Admins have the highest administrative privileges within a Unity Catalog metastore. They can transfer ownership of any Unity Catalog object, including catalogs, schemas, tables, storage credentials, and external locations. Metastore Admins are also required to manage Delta Sharing configurations such as creating or transferring shares and recipients.

Account Admins, by contrast, only create metastores and cannot change ownership or manage Delta Sharing objects. Workspace Admins have privileges limited to workspace-level management, not cross-metastore access.

Reference Source: Databricks Unity Catalog Administration Guide – “Metastore admin privileges and ownership transfer.”

Cmd 6 is the command that should be removed from the notebook before scheduling it as a job. This command is selecting all the columns from the finalDF dataframe and displaying them in the notebook. This is not necessary for the job, as the finalDF dataframe is already written to a table in Cmd 7. Displaying the dataframe in the notebook will only consume resources and time, and it will not affect the output of the job. Therefore, Cmd 6 is redundant and should be removed.

The other commands are essential for the job, as they perform the following tasks:

Cmd 1: Reads the raw_data table into a Spark dataframe called rawDF.

Cmd 2: Prints the schema of the rawDF dataframe, which is useful for debugging and understanding the data structure.

Cmd 3: Selects all the columns from the rawDF dataframe, as well as the nested columns from the values struct column, and creates a new dataframe called flattenedDF.

Cmd 4: Drops the values column from the flattenedDF dataframe, as it is no longer needed after flattening, and creates a new dataframe called finalDF.

Cmd 5: Explains the physical plan of the finalDF dataframe, which is useful for optimizing and tuning the performance of the job.

Cmd 7: Writes the finalDF dataframe to a table called flat_data, using the append mode to add new data to the existing table.

This is the correct answer because the code uses the dropDuplicates method to remove any duplicate records within each batch of data before writing to the orders table. However, this method does not check for duplicates across different batches or in the target table, so it is possible that newly written records may have duplicates already present in the target table. To avoid this, a better approach would be to use Delta Lake and perform an upsert operation using mergeInto. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Delta Lake” section; Databricks Documentation, under “DROP DUPLICATES” section.

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.

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.

The official Delta Sharing guidance specifies that in order for recipients to use time travel queries and streaming reads , providers must share Delta tables WITH HISTORY . Sharing history ensures the Delta log is included, which enables efficient access to table snapshots and incremental data streams. Additionally, Change Data Feed (CDF) must be enabled prior to sharing if downstream consumers require streaming CDC queries. Without history, recipients cannot perform time travel or streaming queries. Open sharing supports static Delta tables but lacks streaming support. Therefore, sharing tables WITH HISTORY and enabling CDF is the required configuration for both performance and functionality.

The failure is that the code to add CHECK constraints to the Delta Lake table fails when executed. The code uses ALTER TABLE ADD CONSTRAINT commands to add two CHECK constraints to a table named activity_details. The first constraint checks if the latitude value is between -90 and 90, and the second constraint checks if the longitude value is between -180 and 180. The cause of this failure is that the activity_details table already contains records that violate these constraints, meaning that they have invalid latitude or longitude values outside of these ranges. When adding CHECK constraints to an existing table, Delta Lake verifies that all existing data satisfies the constraints before adding them to the table. If any record violates the constraints, Delta Lake throws an exception and aborts the operation. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Delta Lake” section;  Databricks Documentation , under “Add a CHECK constraint to an existing table” section.

https://docs.databricks.com/en/sql/language-manual/sql-ref-syntax-ddl-alter-table.html#add-constraint

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

Databricks recommends Liquid Clustering for optimizing data layout in large Delta tables where query filters involve high-cardinality columns. Liquid Clustering automatically manages file organization and supports incremental maintenance without the need to rewrite data when clustering keys evolve. This is a key advantage over static partitioning or Z-ordering, which require costly file rewrites whenever optimization keys change. By combining Liquid Clustering with a periodic OPTIMIZE command, Databricks automatically compacts small files and maintains efficient data skipping performance. As stated in the Delta Lake optimization guide, Liquid Clustering is designed for scalability, minimal maintenance, and adaptability for analytical workloads with evolving query patterns—making B the correct answer.