DP-750 Certification Practice Question #13

Question

A data engineering team is designing the serving layer of a Unity Catalog `analytics` schema. For each of the following requirements, choose the most appropriate Unity Catalog object. Assume Databricks SQL with serverless compute is available and that materialized views can be created and refreshed standalone.

```mermaid
flowchart TD
    subgraph Req1[Requirement 1]
        R1[Store raw ingested transaction rows that downstream jobs run INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, and MERGE INTO against]
        O1{Object: managed table / view / materialized view}
    end
    subgraph Req2[Requirement 2]
        R2[Expose a column-renamed, business-friendly projection of a table with NO extra storage and results that are always live at query time]
        O2{Object: managed table / view / materialized view}
    end
    subgraph Req3[Requirement 3]
        R3[Precompute an expensive GROUP BY aggregation so a BI dashboard reads cached results with low latency, refreshed on a schedule and incrementally when possible]
        O3{Object: managed table / view / materialized view}
    end
    subgraph Req4[Requirement 4]
        R4[Provide a session-scoped projection inside a single notebook that disappears when the notebook detaches]
        O4{Object: temporary view / external table / materialized view}
    end
```

Accepted Answer

A standard managed table is the only object that physically stores rows and supports DML such as `MERGE INTO`, so it is correct for the mutable raw layer. A view stores no data and recomputes its defining query on every read, which gives an always-live, zero-storage business projection — ideal for renaming and reshaping columns. A materialized view precomputes and caches results, refreshing on a schedule (and incrementally where possible), which is exactly the pattern for keeping a BI dashboard fast while limiting recomputation cost. A temporary view is scoped to the notebook/script and disappears when the notebook detaches from compute, satisfying the session-scoped requirement.

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