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 a dimensional hierarchy

As we have already explored dimensional hierarchy in Chapter 4, Designing the Serving Layer under the Designing a dimensional hierarchy section we will not be repeating it here. Please have a look at Chapter 4 to refresh your understanding of dimensional hierarchy.

Let's next look at the techniques available for reading and writing data in Parquet files.

Delivering data in Parquet files

In this section, we will learn to deliver data that is present in Parquet files via both Synapse SQL and Spark. We will use the concept of external tables that we learned in the previous chapter to accomplish this.

Let's consider an example where we have the trips data stored as Parquet files. We will use Synapse SQL serverless pools and Spark to access the data and run some sample queries on it.

Synapse SQL serverless

Let's create an external table from within the Synapse SQL query editor that points to the Parquet files on the Azure...