Databricks Data Engineer Associate Question 16
Select 3A data engineering team at a retail company has implemented a Delta Lake architecture to manage their data lifecycle. They have bronze tables for raw ingestion, silver tables for cleaned and enriched data, and gold tables for business-level aggregations and analytics. Which of the following workloads would typically use a gold table as a source?
- A
A real-time streaming pipeline that performs data cleansing and schema validation.
- B
An executive dashboard displaying key performance indicators (KPIs) for sales and marketing performance.
- C
A machine learning model training job that requires high-quality, aggregated features.
- D
A data pipeline that performs transformations on raw IoT sensor data to enrich it with metadata.
- E
A business intelligence (BI) tool used by analysts for ad-hoc querying and reporting.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answers: B, C, E
Explanation
Gold tables are designed for business-level analytics, aggregations, and high-quality data consumption by downstream applications such as dashboards, BI tools, or ML training jobs. They provide curated data that is ready for business use cases, unlike bronze tables (raw data) or silver tables (cleaned and enriched data).
- A. Incorrect.
A real-time streaming pipeline typically works with raw or semi-processed data, which would come from a bronze or silver table, not a gold table.
- B. Correct.
An executive dashboard would require high-quality, aggregated, and business-ready data, which is typically stored in a gold table.
- C. Correct.
A machine learning model training job often requires processed and aggregated features, which are typically derived from gold tables.
- D. Incorrect.
A data pipeline dealing with raw IoT sensor data would use a bronze table as the source, as it is responsible for cleaning and enriching the data before it is moved to silver or gold tables.
- E. Correct.
A BI tool for ad-hoc querying and reporting would use business-ready, aggregated data, which is stored in gold tables.