Databricks Data Analyst Databricks-Certified-Data-Analyst-Associate Question # 17 Topic 2 Discussion

A Structured Streaming pipeline that processes data in micro-batches and populates gold-level tables every minute requires a high level of compute resources to handle the frequent data ingestion, processing, and writing. This could result in a significant cost for the organization, especially if the data volume and velocity are large. Therefore, the data analyst should share this caution with the project stakeholders before setting up the dashboard and evaluate the trade-offs between the desired refresh rate and the available budget. The other options are not valid cautions because:

B. The gold-level tables are assumed to be appropriately clean for business reporting, as they are the final output of the data engineering pipeline. If the data quality is not satisfactory, the issue should be addressed at the source or silver level, not at the gold level.

C. The streaming data is an appropriate data source for a dashboard, as it can provide near real-time insights and analytics for the business users. Structured Streaming supports various sources and sinks for streaming data, including Delta Lake, which can enable both batch and streaming queries on the same data.

D. The streaming cluster is fault tolerant, as Structured Streaming provides end-to-end exactly-once fault-tolerance guarantees through checkpointing and write-ahead logs. If a query fails, it can be restarted from the last checkpoint and resume processing.

E. The dashboard can be refreshed within one minute or less of new data becoming available in the gold-level tables, as Structured Streaming can trigger micro-batches as fast as possible (every few seconds) and update the results incrementally. However, this may not be necessary or optimal for the business use case, as it could cause frequent changes in the dashboard and consume more resources. References: Streaming on Databricks, Monitoring Structured Streaming queries on Databricks, A look at the new Structured Streaming UI in Apache Spark 3.0, Run your first Structured Streaming workload