Databricks Updated Databricks-Certified-Professional-Data-Engineer Exam Questions and Answers by myra

The approach that would simplify the identification of the changed records is to replace the current overwrite logic with a merge statement to modify only those records that have changed, and write logic to make predictions on the changed records identified by the change data feed. This approach leverages the Delta Lake features of merge and change data feed, which are designed to handle upserts and track row-level changes in a Delta table12. By using merge, the data engineering team can avoid overwriting the entire table every night, and only update or insert the records that have changed in the source data. By using change data feed, the ML team can easily access the change events that have occurred in the customer_churn_params table, and filter them by operation type (update or insert) and timestamp. This way, they can only make predictions on the records that have changed in the past 24 hours, and avoid re-processing the unchanged records.

The other options are not as simple or efficient as the proposed approach, because:

Option A would require applying the churn model to all rows in the customer_churn_params table, which would be wasteful and redundant. It would also require implementing logic to perform an upsert into the predictions table, which would be more complex than using the merge statement.

Option B would require converting the batch job to a Structured Streaming job, which would involve changing the data ingestion and processing logic. It would also require using the complete output mode, which would output the entire result table every time there is a change in the source data, which would be inefficient and costly.

Option C would require calculating the difference between the previous model predictions and the current customer_churn_params on a key identifying unique customers, which would be computationally expensive and prone to errors. It would also require storing and accessing the previous predictions, which would add extra storage and I/O costs.

Option D would require modifying the overwrite logic to include a field populated by calling spark.sql.functions.current_timestamp() as data are being written, which would add extra complexity and overhead to the data engineering job. It would also require using this field to identify records written on a particular date, which would be less accurate and reliable than using the change data feed.

When introducing a new aggregation or a change in the logic of a Structured Streaming query, it is generally necessary to specify a new checkpoint location. This is because the checkpoint directory contains metadata about the offsets and the state of the aggregations of a streaming query. If the logic of the query changes, such as including a new aggregation field, the state information saved in the current checkpoint would not be compatible with the new logic, potentially leading to incorrect results or failures. Therefore, to accommodate the new field and ensure the streaming job has the correct starting point and state information for aggregations, a new checkpoint location should be specified.

To validate that all records from the source are included in the derived table, creating a view that performs a left outer join between the validation_copy table and the report table is effective. The view can highlight any discrepancies, such as null values in the report table's key columns, indicating missing records. This view can then be referenced in DLT (Delta Live Tables) expectations for the report table to ensure data integrity. This approach allows for a comprehensive comparison between the source and the derived table.

Given the information that the model is registered with MLflow and assuming predict is the method used to apply the model to a set of columns, we use the model.predict() function to apply the model to the DataFrame df using the specified columns. The model.predict() function is designed to take in a DataFrame and a list of column names as arguments, applying the trained model to these features to produce a predictions column. When working with PySpark, this predictions column needs to be selected alongside the customer_id to create a new DataFrame with the schema customer_id LONG, predictions DOUBLE.