Azure data engineer interview questions and answers
Storage, compute and analytics questions for data engineers working on Microsoft Azure. 47 questions with full answers, written for freshers. All topics
Read the notes: Azure Cloud Data EngineerCloud (24)
- Azure Synapse (and vs Snowflake)
- ADF vs Airflow
- Microsoft Fabric and OneLake
- Azure Entra ID and RBAC for data pipelines
- ADLS Gen2 Medallion directory layout and lifecycle management
- Controlling costs in Azure Synapse and Data Factory
- Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL Pool table distribution
- Azure Data Factory pipeline triggers and Integration Runtimes
- Azure Event Hubs partitions and Event Hubs Capture
- Securing Azure data pipelines with VNets, Private Endpoints, and Key Vault
- Choosing between ADF, Synapse Pipelines, and Databricks on Azure
- Querying data lake files with Azure Synapse Serverless SQL
- Azure Data Factory building blocks: pipelines, activities, datasets, linked services
- Incremental load in Azure Data Factory with a watermark
- Metadata-driven ADF pipelines with Lookup and ForEach
- CI/CD for Azure Data Factory: Git, ARM templates and environments
- Error handling in Azure Data Factory: retries, failure paths and pipeline status
- Azure Data Factory Self-Hosted Integration Runtime architecture
- Azure Event Hubs capture to ADLS Gen2 and consumer groups
- Azure Private Endpoints and virtual network security for ADLS Gen2
- Azure Managed Identities and Key Vault secrets elimination
- Azure Databricks Delta Lake optimization: liquid clustering and predictive I/O
- Metadata-driven ingestion framework in Azure Data Factory
- Multi-region disaster recovery for Azure data lakes with paired regions
Snowflake, BigQuery & Databricks (23)
- Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL Pool 60-distribution architecture
- Table distribution strategies in Synapse: Hash, Round Robin, Replicated
- Clustered Columnstore Indexes in Synapse
- Loading data into Synapse with COPY INTO
- Synapse Serverless SQL versus Synapse Dedicated SQL Pool
- Distribution skew and Data Movement Service in Synapse
- Synapse Workload Management and Workload Groups
- Clustered Columnstore maintenance and health in Synapse
- Primary key and unique constraints in Synapse Dedicated Pool
- Partitioning tables in Synapse Dedicated SQL Pool
- Synapse Result Set Caching
- Temporary tables versus permanent staging tables in Synapse ETL
- Microsoft Fabric Warehouse versus Synapse Dedicated SQL Pool
- Statistics maintenance in Synapse Dedicated Pool
- Transaction log and rollback limits in Synapse
- Reading Synapse query execution plans via dynamic management views
- Surface lake data via Synapse Serverless views into Power BI
- Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB and SQL Server
- Minimizing Data Movement Service shuffle in multi-table joins
- Dynamic data masking and granular column security in Azure Synapse
- Zero-downtime blue-green schema deployment in Synapse Dedicated Pool
- Recovering from severe tempdb exhaustion in Synapse Dedicated Pool
- Cross-region disaster recovery and geo-backup in Azure Synapse