Databricks Updated Databricks-Certified-Data-Engineer-Associate Exam Questions and Answers by justin

A data engineer can create a multi-task job in Databricks that consists of multiple tasks that run in a specific order. Each task can have one or more dependencies, which are other tasks that must run before the current task. The Depends On field of a new Databricks Job Task allows the data engineer to specify the dependencies of the task. The data engineer should select a task in the Depends On field when they want the new task to run only after the selected task has successfully completed. This can help the data engineer to create a logical sequence of tasks that depend on each other’s outputs or results. For example, a data engineer can create a multi-task job that consists of the following tasks:

Task A: Ingest data from a source using Auto Loader

Task B: Transform the data using Spark SQL

Task C: Write the data to a Delta Lake table

Task D: Analyze the data using Spark ML

Task E: Visualize the data using Databricks SQL

In this case, the data engineer can set the dependencies of each task as follows:

Task A: No dependencies

Task B: Depends on Task A

Task C: Depends on Task B

Task D: Depends on Task C

Task E: Depends on Task D

This way, the data engineer can ensure that each task runs only after the previous task has successfully completed, and the data flows smoothly from ingestion to visualization.

The other options are incorrect because they do not describe valid scenarios for selecting a task in the Depends On field. The Depends On field does not affect the following aspects of a task:

Whether the task needs to be replaced by another task

Whether the task needs to fail before another task begins

Whether the task has the same dependency libraries as another task

Whether the task needs to use as little compute resources as possible References: Create a multi-task job, Run tasks conditionally in a Databricks job, Databricks Jobs.

To read from a stream source, the data engineer needs to use the spark.readStream method instead of the spark.read method. The spark.readStream method returns a DataStreamReader object that can be used to specify the details of the input source, such as the format, the schema, the path, and the options. The spark.read method is only suitable for batch processing, not streaming processing. The other changes are not necessary or correct for reading from a stream source. References: Structured Streaming Programming Guide, Read a stream, Databricks Data Sources

The MERGE INTO command is used to perform upserts, which are a combination of insertions and updates, based on a source table into a target Delta table1. The MERGE INTO command can handle scenarios where the target table cannot contain duplicate records, such as when there is a primary key or a unique constraint on the target table. The MERGE INTO command can match the source and target rows based on a merge condition and perform different actions depending on whether the rows are matched or not. For example, the MERGE INTO command can update the existing target rows with the new source values, insert the new source rows that do not exist in the target table, or delete the target rows that do not exist in the source table1.

The INSERT INTO command is used to append new rows to an existing table or create a new table from a query result2. The INSERT INTO command does not perform any updates or deletions on the existing target table rows. The INSERT INTO command can handle scenarios where the location of the data needs to be changed, such as when the data needs to be moved from one table to another, or when the data needs to be partitioned by a certain column2. The INSERT INTO command can also handle scenarios where the target table is an external table, such as when the data is stored in an external storage system like Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage3. The INSERT INTO command can also handle scenarios where the source table can be deleted, such as when the source table is a temporary table or a view4. The INSERT INTO command can also handle scenarios where the source is not a Delta table, such as when the source is a Parquet, CSV, JSON, or Avro file5.