Data Engineering Associate with Databricks Practice Exam

In managing an ELT pipeline with Delta Live Tables, what must be done to ensure notebooks execute in a specific order?

1. Create a workflow in the workspace

2. Use Delta Live Tables to manage the notebook execution order

3. Manually execute each notebook

4. Schedule the execution with the Jobs page

The correct answer is: Use Delta Live Tables to manage the notebook execution order

Using Delta Live Tables to manage the notebook execution order is essential in ensuring that the pipelines run smoothly and efficiently. Delta Live Tables allows data engineers to define a series of transformations and dependencies explicitly. When you use this feature, you can specify the relationships between different data processing steps in your notebooks, which enables the system to determine the correct order of execution based on those dependencies. This capability is particularly important in an ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) pipeline, where the data transformations need to occur in a logical sequence—often dependent on the completion of previous steps. By leveraging Delta Live Tables, you can create a more automated and incident-free workflow, as the system automatically handles the execution of notebooks according to the specified order. In contrast, creating a workflow in the workspace or scheduling execution with the Jobs page may provide additional functionality for managing jobs but does not inherently address the dependency management and execution order within the notebooks themselves. Similarly, manually executing each notebook is prone to human error and may lead to inconsistencies in execution order, which could disrupt the entire pipeline process. Hence, using Delta Live Tables to explicitly manage execution order is the most efficient and reliable method in this context.