Azure Databricks Data Engineer Associate case studies
Azure Databricks Data Engineer Associate · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate is a proctored, entry-level certification that assesses a candidate's ability to use the Databricks Data + AI Platform to execute foundational data engineering tasks. It is aimed at practitioners with hands-on experience performing the data engineering tasks outlined in the official exam guide, and no formal prerequisite is required, though related training is highly recommended. The Azure Databricks Data Engineer Associate case studies are 5 cases and about 3,936 words.
1Auto Loader at 40,000 files per hour: latency, schema drift, and silent row loss
A manufacturer lands telemetry in an ADLS Gen2 container: roughly 40,000 JSON files per hour, each 20-60 KB, plus one 900 MB Parquet export per night from an ERP. A single Auto Loader stream in a Lakeflow pipeline writes both feeds into one bronze streaming table in Unity Catalog and uses directory listing for file discovery.
798 words, about 4 min2SCD Type 2 dimension inflating a finance dashboard and recomputing nightly
A retail team models dim customer as an SCD Type 2 streaming table in a Lakeflow pipeline, fed by APPLY CHANGES from a bronze CDC stream carrying customer id , version ts , and a soft-delete flag. There are 6.2 million customers and roughly 900,000 change rows per day.
830 words, about 4 min3Repair run duplicated claims, and an unreproducible 45-day backfill
An insurer runs one Lakeflow job with 26 tasks: 4 ingestion tasks, 12 parallel silver notebook tasks, a for-each task fanning out to 8 SQL tasks, and 2 gold tasks. The job is triggered on file arrival, runs every 2 hours, and is configured with max concurrent runs = 1 and queueing enabled.
770 words, about 4 min4One task runs for three hours while 199 finish in seconds
A PySpark notebook joins a 1.4 TB Delta fact to a 3 MB dim product Delta table and writes a partitioned aggregate. The cluster is 8 workers x 8 cores / 64 GB, autoscaling 2-8, on DBR 15.4 LTS with AQE at defaults.
725 words, about 4 min5Row filters bypassed by a definer-rights view and a lingering direct grant
A bank runs a Unity Catalog metastore with dev and prod catalogs. PII sits in prod.risk.customer , which has email , phone , national id , and region .
813 words, about 4 min