Ace Your Databricks-Certified-Data-Engineer-Associate Databricks Certification Exam

Databricks separates workspace-management services from data processing. Notebook source files stored as workspace objects are managed in the Databricks control plane and are encrypted at rest. When the scheduled job starts, Databricks orchestrates the run from the control plane, but the notebook commands execute on compute resources in the compute plane. The compute plane is where Spark transformations, Python code, and other data-processing operations run. Unity Catalog governs data and AI assets but is not the execution environment or the general storage location for workspace notebook source. Delta Lake is a table-storage layer and does not execute notebook code. Option D is also incorrect because Databricks does not describe workspace notebook source as unencrypted. Therefore, option C accurately represents the separation between notebook storage and workload execution.

Option A is the correct answer because it shows the result of an INNER JOIN between the two tables. An INNER JOIN returns only the rows that have matching values in both tables based on the join condition. In this case, the join condition is ON a.customer_id = c.customer_id, which means that only the rows that have the same customer ID in both tables will be included in the output. The output will have four columns: customer_id, name, account_id, and overdraft_amt. The output will have four rows, corresponding to the four customers who have accounts in the account table.

The use of INNER JOIN can be referenced from Databricks documentation on SQL JOIN or from other sources like W3Schools or GeeksforGeeks.

Serverless compute for workflows is designed to minimize operational overhead for Databricks Jobs while enforcing Unity Catalog governance. When a job is configured to run on serverless compute (in supported regions), Databricks automatically selects instance types , manages autoscaling , enables Photon where applicable, and handles runtime upgrades without user intervention. This directly satisfies the requirement to reduce operational toil. All-purpose clusters (option B) and traditional job clusters (option C) still require users to manage cluster sizing, instance families, and runtime versions, which contradicts the goal of automation. SQL warehouses (option A) are intended for SQL workloads and do not support running general Python notebook job tasks as workflow steps. Databricks documentation specifies that serverless workflows are compatible with Unity Catalog and are the recommended approach when users want fully managed compute for scheduled pipelines and tasks, provided the workspace is in a supported region. This makes serverless compute the correct and fully compliant solution.

In Unity Catalog, an external table is defined by referencing data that already exists in cloud storage, and Databricks documentation states that this is done by using a LOCATION clause that points to the storage path. Databricks also notes that the external table’s path should be contained within an existing external location that has been configured with the appropriate storage credential and access permissions. This makes option A the correct choice. Option B is incorrect because simply calling something “unmanaged” without specifying a location does not create a proper Unity Catalog external table. Option C is also incorrect because Databricks documentation explicitly requires a storage location for Unity Catalog external tables. Option D is wrong because managed tables are intended for Databricks-managed storage and lifecycle handling, not for referencing existing external files. So, for ADLS-based data that must remain in place while still being queryable through Databricks, the right pattern is to configure the external location and then create the table with a CREATE TABLE ... LOCATION statement.

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