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Delta Lake

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3 views2 pages

Delta Lake

Gcv g

Uploaded by

mepunithavalli
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Frequently Asked Interview Questions

Q1 . Why choose lakehouse over data lake?


Delta lake is a hybrid of a data lake and a data warehouse, and adapting delta lake’s lakehouse will deliver the best of
both worlds. Harnessing the benefits of a delta lake for storing unstructured data with ACID transactions, serving BI
operations, and training ML models on the data is efficient.
Delta lake presents multiple propitiatory features for handling streaming data, machine learning models, data quality,
governance, and scalability.

Q2 . What are the different layers of a lakehouse?


Deltalake supports multiple layers by different names – “Delta”, “multi-hop”, “medallion”, and “bronze/silver/gold”
layers.

Bronze / Raw Layer: This is the docking layer for upstream data sources to ingest raw data.
The bronze layer is for storing raw files or data as it arrives. This layer is a source layer for downstream silver layers.
Silver / Aggregate Layer: This is the central layer where ETL and aggregations take place.
The silver layer is where we perform data quality checks, governance, joins, and aggregations.
Gold / Business Layer: This is the final layer where business-level use-case-specific aggregations take place.
The gold layer is the source for dashboards, analytics, and BI tasks.

Q3 . What is the delta format?


Delta format is an exclusive open-source product derived from parquet data format by data bricks.
delta_format = spark.read.format("delta").load("path_to_file")
Delta format uses parquet’s schema-on-read and supports schema-on-write by providing a transactional storage layer.
Delta format maintains versioning to support lineage and state. Delta format stores metadata in the _delta_log folder to
support ACID transactions.

Q4. what is a transaction in delta lake?


Delta lake transaction is an entry in the _delta_log table to mark a query/operation completed successfully. Delta lake
supports transactions at table level. for example,
CREATE OR REPLACE TABLE test_table (name STRING, reputation INT, count INT);
INSERT INTO test_table VALUES ('Analytics_vidya', 2, 10);
The above SQL query creates two transactions in the _delta_log folder for the CRAS statement and INSERT. If we
insert multiple entries via individual insert queries, a transaction will get appended for each insert.
Multiple entries in a single insert will add one transaction log.
INSERT INTO test_table VALUES ('Analytics_vidya', 2, 10),
('Databricks', 5, 20);
All the transactions are logged as JSON files in the _delta_log folder incrementally.

Q5. Does delta lake support upserts?


Yes, Delta lake offers upsert operations via the MERGE function.
In SQL, upserts are a means to accomplish updates and inserts simultaneously. Delta lake’s MERGE operates similarly
by providing the mechanism to execute insert, update and delete operations in one go.

Delta lake supports checkpointing with write-ahead logs / Journaling to overcome data loss with robust recovery
mechanisms and guarantees.
To achieve durability in an operation, databases and file systems offer write-ahead logs. Delta lake makes use of this
feature through checkpointing

What is a constraint in delta lake?


Constraints are a way to enforce checks on our data to verify the quality and integrity of the data.
ALTER TABLE test_table ADD CONSTRAINT dateWithinRange CHECK (birthDate > '1995-01-01');
Delta lake offers NULL and CHECK constraints to handle nulls and filter data during load/modification.

. What is delta time travel in the lakehouse?


Time travel is a way/technique to roll back or reference a prior data version for audit or to roll back data in case of bad
writes or accidental deletes.
Delta lake creates snapshots of the data and maintains versioning. All the changes to the data get logged as metadata
in _delta_log.
Delta lake provides two variants to accomplish time travel. One uses version, and the other uses timestamps.

Version format-

SELECT count(*) FROM test_table VERSION AS OF 5


SELECT count(*) FROM test_table@v
Timestamp format-
SELECT count(*) FROM test_table TIMESTAMP AS OF "2022-07-01"
Q9. What is Autoloader?

The autoloader is Databricks’ recommended way to handle streaming data efficiently and with ease. Autoloader offers
a way to read data from cloud object storage as it arrives, resulting in limited REST calls to the cloud storage with
added security.

How do you tackle the small file problem and skewness in delta lake?
Delta lake is packed with tons of optimizations to handle many know issues that we encounter with big data.
Most of the time to make sure that our cluster resources utilization and our aggregations are getting executed
optimally, it is necessary to make sure we partition our data.
But, Databricks recommends avoiding partitioning the data until necessary because delta lake takes care of the
partitions based on their cardinality using proprietary algorithms(auto-optimize).
Databricks performs multiple scans on partitions to check if the data can be compacted further based on small file size
to collate small files and avoid skewness in data.
delta.autoOptimize.autoCompact = true
delta.autoOptimize.optimizeWrite = true
We can manually perform optimization and use Zorder to index our files to merge small files into a manageable
partition.
OPTIMIZE test_table
ZORDER BY id
ZORDER is a mechanism used by delta lake data-skipping algorithms for scanning a set of files to Colocate column
information and compact files based on an index.

1. What is VACCUM?
Continuous data upserts get logged in the _delta_logs folder with a versioned copy.
SET spark.databricks.delta.retentionDurationCheck.enabled = false;
VACUUM test_table RETAIN 0 HOURS;
SET spark.databricks.delta.vacuum.logging.enabled = true;
VACCUM is useful for truncating files from the directory that are no longer valid after a period.
Default Vaccum period to 7 days. Overwrite this carefully in production to avoid data loss.

2. What is ZORDER?
ZORDER is a mechanism used by delta lake data-skipping algorithms for scanning a set of files to Colocate column
information and compact files based on an index.

3. How to roll back or restore data?


Delta lake offers a way similar to time travel to restore the files which are deleted or modified accidentally.
RESTORE TABLE test_table TO VERSION AS OF 8;

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