Azure DP-900 flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Structured data

Data organized into a predefined schema of tables, rows, and columns, such as records in a relational database. It is straightforward to query with SQL and enforce with constraints.

Semi-structured data

Data that uses tags or keys to organize itself without a rigid table schema, such as JSON or XML documents. It is more flexible than structured data yet still self-describing.

Unstructured data

Data with no predefined model or schema, such as images, audio, video, and free text. Specialized tools or AI services are usually needed to extract meaning from it.

OLTP workload

A transactional workload characterized by many small, frequent read and write operations, where fast response time and data integrity matter more than large-scale aggregation.

OLAP workload

An analytical workload that reads large volumes of historical data and aggregates it for reporting and decision-making, typically served from a data warehouse.

ACID properties

Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability: guarantees that a transaction completes fully or not at all and leaves the database in a valid state.

Primary key vs foreign key

A primary key uniquely identifies each row in a table; a foreign key is a column that references another table's primary key to enforce a relationship between them.

Batch vs stream processing

Batch processing handles accumulated data in large scheduled chunks, while stream processing handles continuous events in near real time as they arrive.

Azure SQL Database

A platform-as-a-service relational database from Microsoft that provides built-in high availability, automated backups, and elastic scaling without managing an operating system or SQL Server installation.

Azure SQL Managed Instance

A platform-as-a-service offering that runs a near-complete SQL Server engine inside a virtual network, supporting instance-scoped features such as SQL Agent and cross-database queries.

SQL Server on Azure VMs

An infrastructure-as-a-service option that runs full SQL Server inside a virtual machine, giving complete control over the operating system, engine version, and configuration.

Elastic pool

A shared set of compute and storage resources in Azure SQL Database used by several databases together, which suits databases with unpredictable or intermittent usage peaks.

DTU purchasing model

A billing model for Azure SQL Database that bundles compute, memory, and read/write rates into a single Database Transaction Unit measure with a fixed amount of included storage.

vCore purchasing model

A billing model for Azure SQL Database, Managed Instance, and SQL Server on VMs that charges for virtual cores, memory, and storage separately and qualifies for Azure Hybrid Benefit.

Point-in-time restore

An Azure SQL Database capability that restores a database to any moment within a retention window, typically up to 35 days, using automated backups.

Always Encrypted

A SQL Server and Azure SQL feature that encrypts sensitive columns on the client side so the database engine never sees plaintext data, protecting against privileged database access.

Azure Blob Storage

An object storage service for massive amounts of unstructured data such as documents, images, and backups, organized into containers and separated by access tiers.

Blob access tiers

Hot, Cool, Cold, and Archive tiers in Azure Blob Storage trade storage cost against access cost and latency; Archive is cheapest to store but slowest to read.

Data Lake Storage Gen2

Azure Blob Storage extended with a hierarchical namespace, which enables directory-level access control and lets analytics engines read it as a file system at scale.

Azure Table Storage

A NoSQL key-value store for schemaless entities identified by a partition key and row key, offering inexpensive storage for very large volumes of simple structured records.

Azure Cosmos DB

A globally distributed multi-model NoSQL database service that offers five tunable consistency levels and single-digit millisecond latency across replicated Azure regions.

Cosmos DB request unit

The normalized throughput currency of Azure Cosmos DB: it measures the cost of reads, writes, and queries against provisioned or autoscale RU/s capacity.

Cosmos DB consistency levels

Five settings from strongest to weakest are strong, bounded staleness, session, consistent prefix, and eventual, trading data freshness guarantees against latency and availability.

Azure Files

A managed cloud file share service that exposes SMB and NFS shares mountable by many clients, commonly used to replace or extend on-premises file servers.

Azure Synapse Analytics

A unified analytics platform combining dedicated SQL pools, a serverless SQL pool, Apache Spark pools, pipelines, and data integration inside a single workspace.

Dedicated SQL pool

A provisioned Synapse component that stores data in relational tables distributed across compute nodes with massively parallel processing for high-performance data warehousing.

Serverless SQL pool

A Synapse component that queries files in a data lake using T-SQL without provisioning storage, billing only for the data processed by each query.

Azure Data Factory

A cloud data integration service that runs pipelines of activities orchestrating data movement and transformation, using linked services, datasets, and integration runtimes.

Azure Databricks

A managed Apache Spark analytics platform with collaborative notebooks, used for large-scale data engineering, streaming, and machine learning workloads on Delta Lake.

Azure Stream Analytics

A real-time stream processing engine that runs SQL-like queries over continuous data from Event Hubs or IoT Hub and writes results to storage, databases, or Power BI.

Star schema

A data warehouse design with a central fact table of measurements surrounded by denormalized dimension tables that describe it, keeping analytical joins to a single hop.

Power BI semantic model

A layer of tables, relationships, measures, and business logic, often authored in Power BI, that reporting visuals query to return consistent results.