Databricks Databricks-Certified-Professional-Data-Engineer Exam With Confidence Using Practice Dumps

Partitioning a Delta Lake table improves query performance by organizing data into partitions based on the values of a column. In the given schema, the date column is a good candidate for partitioning for several reasons:

Time-Based Queries: If queries frequently filter or group by date, partitioning by the date column can significantly improve performance by limiting the amount of data scanned.

Granularity: The date column likely has a granularity that leads to a reasonable number of partitions (not too many and not too few). This balance is important for optimizing both read and write performance.

Data Skew: Other columns like post_id or user_id might lead to uneven partition sizes (data skew), which can negatively impact performance.

Partitioning by post_time could also be considered, but typically date is preferred due to its more manageable granularity.

 This is the correct answer because Delta Lake uses a transaction log to store metadata about each table, including min and max statistics for each column in each data file. The Delta engine can use this information to quickly identify which files to load based on a filter condition, without scanning the entire table or the file footers. This is called data skipping and it can improve query performance significantly. Verified References: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under “Delta Lake” section; [Databricks Documentation], under “Optimizations - Data Skipping” section.

In the Transaction log, Delta Lake captures statistics for each data file of the table. These statistics indicate per file:

- Total number of records

- Minimum value in each column of the first 32 columns of the table

- Maximum value in each column of the first 32 columns of the table

- Null value counts for in each column of the first 32 columns of the table

When a query with a selective filter is executed against the table, the query optimizer uses these statistics to generate the query result. it leverages them to identify data files that may contain records matching the conditional filter.

For the SELECT query in the question, The transaction log is scanned for min and max statistics for the price column