Book Image

Azure Data Engineer Associate Certification Guide

By : Newton Alex
Book Image

Azure Data Engineer Associate Certification Guide

By: Newton Alex

Overview of this book

Azure is one of the leading cloud providers in the world, providing numerous services for data hosting and data processing. Most of the companies today are either cloud-native or are migrating to the cloud much faster than ever. This has led to an explosion of data engineering jobs, with aspiring and experienced data engineers trying to outshine each other. Gaining the DP-203: Azure Data Engineer Associate certification is a sure-fire way of showing future employers that you have what it takes to become an Azure Data Engineer. This book will help you prepare for the DP-203 examination in a structured way, covering all the topics specified in the syllabus with detailed explanations and exam tips. The book starts by covering the fundamentals of Azure, and then takes the example of a hypothetical company and walks you through the various stages of building data engineering solutions. Throughout the chapters, you'll learn about the various Azure components involved in building the data systems and will explore them using a wide range of real-world use cases. Finally, you’ll work on sample questions and answers to familiarize yourself with the pattern of the exam. By the end of this Azure book, you'll have gained the confidence you need to pass the DP-203 exam with ease and land your dream job in data engineering.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Part 1: Azure Basics
3
Part 2: Data Storage
10
Part 3: Design and Develop Data Processing (25-30%)
15
Part 4: Design and Implement Data Security (10-15%)
17
Part 5: Monitor and Optimize Data Storage and Data Processing (10-15%)
20
Part 6: Practice Exercises

Implementing horizontal partitioning or sharding

Let's explore sharding from two different perspectives: a dedicated SQL pool and Spark. Just note that we will be using the terminologies horizontal partitioning and sharding interchangeably throughout the book, but they mean the same thing.

Sharding in Synapse dedicated pools

Synapse SQL dedicated pools have three different types of tables based on how the data is stored, outlined as follows:

  • Clustered columnstore
  • Clustered index
  • Heap

We will be learning more about these table types later in this chapter. Synapse dedicated pools support sharding for all these table types. They provide three different ways to shard the data, as follows:

  • Hash
  • Round-robin
  • Replicated

These methods through which a SQL dedicated pool distributes data among its tables are also called distribution techniques. Sharding and distribution techniques are overlapping technologies that are always specified together...