Databricks Data Engineer Associate Question 9
Select 3A retail company is modernizing its data infrastructure and is considering adopting a data lakehouse architecture instead of maintaining separate data lake and data warehouse systems. Which of the following are key advantages of a data lakehouse compared to a traditional data warehouse?
- A
It provides support for both structured and unstructured data.
- B
It eliminates the need for ETL pipelines between the data lake and data warehouse.
- C
It offers lower storage costs by only supporting structured data.
- D
It enables real-time analytics and machine learning workloads on the same platform.
- E
It sacrifices ACID transactions for scalability.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answers: A, B, D
Explanation
The data lakehouse architecture bridges the gap between data lakes and traditional data warehouses by combining the advantages of both systems. It supports a wide variety of data types, eliminates the need for separate systems and ETL pipelines, and enables real-time analytics and machine learning workloads. Unlike traditional data warehouses, it also ensures cost efficiency and scalability without compromising on ACID transaction support.
- A. Correct.
Correct: A data lakehouse allows the storage and processing of both structured (e.g., tables) and unstructured (e.g., images, videos) data in a single system, unlike traditional data warehouses that primarily focus on structured data.
- B. Correct.
Correct: By combining the capabilities of a data lake and data warehouse, a data lakehouse removes the need for complex ETL pipelines to move data between separate systems.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect: A data lakehouse supports both structured and unstructured data, and its storage costs are generally lower because it leverages cost-efficient cloud storage solutions. However, the claim that it only supports structured data is incorrect.
- D. Correct.
Correct: A data lakehouse enables real-time analytics and machine learning workloads on the same storage layer, thanks to its unified architecture and support for modern processing engines like Apache Spark.
- E. Incorrect.
Incorrect: A data lakehouse supports ACID transactions through technologies like Delta Lake, ensuring data reliability and consistency while maintaining scalability.