Data Engineering Associate with Databricks Practice Exam

What command is used to incrementally ingest data from other systems?

1. COPY INTO

2. INSERT INTO

3. REFRESH TABLE

4. MERGE INTO

The correct answer is: COPY INTO

The command used for incrementally ingesting data from other systems is COPY INTO. This command facilitates the loading of data from a source into a target table and is particularly effective for accessing and ingesting data in bulk from files stored in cloud storage solutions. When working with incremental data ingestion, COPY INTO allows you to specify options that can include filtering or selecting a subset of the data you need, making it efficient for adding only new or updated records to your tables. This is crucial in data engineering workflows where maintaining up-to-date datasets is necessary without reloading entire datasets, which can be resource-intensive and time-consuming. The other options, while useful in different contexts, do not serve the primary purpose of incremental ingestion. INSERT INTO is used to add rows to a table, but lacks the optimizations and capabilities for handling large-scale data in bulk from external sources. REFRESH TABLE is for updating metadata about a table but does not ingest data itself. MERGE INTO is a command designed for performing upserts (updates and inserts) based on conditionally matching records between two datasets, but it typically operates on existing data rather than facilitating the inception of new data from external sources. Thus, COPY INTO is the most suitable command for the task of incremental data ingestion