50 Azure Data Engineering Interview Questions

Azure is one of the very in-demand certification courses for DevOps and data engineers.

Do you want to excel in the Azure data engineering interview?

You must prepare for these Azure data interview questions.

I have categorized these questions based on the topics. And it covers almost every topic that you should prepare for.

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Azure Data Engineering Interview Questions

Here are the topic-wise Azure data engineering questions.

Storage Services

1. What is the difference between ADLS Gen2 and Blob storage?
2. Different ways to connect to ADLS from ADF and ADB.  

Data Storage and Concepts    

3. Difference between data warehouse, data lake, and delta lake.  

Azure Data Factory (ADF) Concepts    

4. Explain different activities, and triggers in ADF.    
5. Explain global parameters in ADF.    
6. Explain the concept of Incremental load and how you achieve it using ADF.  

Project Architecture    

7. Explain your project architecture end-to-end.

(This is a very important question as it has been asked in almost every interview. You should know in and out of the latest project you have mentioned in your resume.)

Azure Data Factory (ADF) real-time questions

8. How you can copy only CSV files from ADLS that have been added in the last 24 hours using ADF?  
9. Different sources you have connected in ADF? 
   (Hint: It is expected that you explain the details required for each connection.)
10. Design the pipeline to pull 10 specific tables from the test schema of an Oracle DB daily. (In detail).
11. Copy files that are less than 2 MB in size.
12. Validate the folder and delete the files inside it.  

Data Modeling and Warehousing    

13. What are the different SCD types? Explain in detail.    
14. Explain star schema and its usage.    
15. Give an example of fact and dimension tables.    
16. Remove duplicates for emp_id. Keep only the latest record (SQL and PySpark).    
17. Filter out bad records for the date column.  

PySpark and Spark Concepts    

18. What is the dropna function in PySpark?
19. How to optimize Spark jobs? 
20. What are the different types of clusters?
21. Difference between job cluster and interactive cluster.    
22. How to call one notebook from another notebook?    
23. How to pass parameters from one notebook to another?    
24. Explain how you will optimize PySpark using different optimization techniques.    
25. What is DAG in Spark?    
26. Explain jobs, stages, and tasks in Spark.
27. Different types of db utilities?
28. Can we connect to the SQL server from the ADB notebook?
29. Write merge statement in PySpark.
30. Explain partitioning, bucketing and salting.
31. Difference between transformations and actions?
32. What are the benefits of lazy evaluation?  

Data Storage and File Formats   

33. What are the drawbacks of Parquet?
34. Which file format will you prefer to load the data in ADLS?
35. How to store the filename with a timestamp in the target?
36. Explain schema enforcement.
37. What are the advantages of the Delta format?
38. What is Z-ordering in Delta?
39. Explain ACID properties in database transactions.
40. How time travel is achieved in Delta Lake?

Pipeline Monitoring and Troubleshooting

41. How will I know if my pipeline fails?
42. How will you set up email notifications in case the pipeline is failed?
43. Explain your approach to troubleshooting a pipeline failure.

Misc

44. Explain a scenario where you solved a complex problem.
45. Explain star & snowflake schema.
46. What is partitioning, coalesce, and UDFs (User-defined functions)?
47. What are the features, and components of Hadoop & its architecture?
48. What is medallion architecture?
49. Mapreduce vs Yarn.
50. Explain the difference between using Kubernetes and using Spark submit.

Azure is one of the top cloud technologies that are highly demanding in IT. If you are appearing for the interview, you should know the answers to these questions.

If you have appeared for the Azure data engineering interview, do share the questions asked in the interview.

All the best!

Aniruddha Chaudhari

I am a Python enthusiast who loves Linux and Vim. I hold a Master of Computer Science degree from NIT Trichy and have 10 years of experience in the IT industry, focusing on the Software Development Lifecycle from Requirements Gathering, Design, Development to Deployment. I have worked at IBM, Ericsson, and NetApp, and I share my knowledge on CSEstack.org.