DP-203 case studies
DP-203 · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Engineer Associate is an intermediate-level, Azure-focused credential for data engineers. Microsoft states that this certification and its renewal assessment are retired, with a retirement date of 03/31/2025, so candidates should confirm the current status before planning a study schedule. The credential targets professionals who integrate, transform, and consolidate structured, unstructured, and streaming data into schemas suitable for analytics. Day-to-day work includes helping stakeholders explore data, building secure and compliant pipelines, and producing cleansed and enhanced datasets using modern data warehouse, big data, or Lakehouse patterns. The DP-203 case studies are 5 cases and about 1,795 words.
1Partitioning a Slow Ingest Pipeline in Azure Synapse
A dedicated SQL pool in Azure Synapse holds a 4 TB fact table FactSales loaded nightly from 400 source CSV files. The table was created with a hash-distributed SaleId and no partition.
413 words, about 2 min2Streaming Sensor Data with Event Hubs and Delta Lake
A manufacturer ingests 50,000 events/second from factory sensors into Azure Event Hubs. A Databricks job reads the stream and writes to Delta Lake.
362 words, about 2 min3Securing a Data Lake with Row-Level and Column-Level Controls
A healthcare insurer stores claims in Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. Analysts in three regions (US, EU, APAC) query through Synapse serverless SQL pools.
352 words, about 2 min4Choosing Between Synapse SQL and Databricks for a Migration
A retail company runs nightly ETL on an on-premises SQL Server. It processes 2 TB of parquet files in a data lake, joins to a 500 GB dimension, and produces 40 aggregate tables.
354 words, about 2 min5Optimizing a Delta Table with Skew and Z-Order
A Delta table FactOrders has 8 TB and is partitioned by OrderDate (daily, 3 years). Queries filter by CustomerId and OrderDate .
314 words, about 2 min