DP-203 Design and implement data storage Practice Question
You are designing a data storage solution for a global e-commerce company. The company's analytics team uses Azure Synapse Serverless SQL to query Parquet files in ADLS Gen2. The data is partitioned by year, month, and day. The team frequently runs queries that aggregate sales by product category across the last 30 days. However, the queries are slow and scanning too much data. What should you do to improve performance?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often think adding more partitions (Option D) or changing file formats (Option B) will help, but they fail to recognize that the real bottleneck is the lack of partition pruning in the query itself, not the storage layout.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Create a view that uses explicit partition pruning by filtering on year, month, and day in the WHERE clause.
Creating a view with explicit partition pruning by filtering on year, month, and day in the WHERE clause forces Synapse Serverless SQL to read only the relevant partitions (the last 30 days) instead of scanning the entire dataset. This reduces the amount of data scanned, directly improving query performance and lowering cost.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the number of files per partition to improve parallelism.
Why it's wrong here
More files do not help with partition pruning.
- ✗
Convert the Parquet files to CSV format to reduce file size.
Why it's wrong here
CSV is larger and slower to query than Parquet.
- ✓
Create a view that uses explicit partition pruning by filtering on year, month, and day in the WHERE clause.
Why this is correct
Serverless SQL can eliminate partitions when filters are on partition columns.
- ✗
Add a new partition by product category to the folder structure.
Why it's wrong here
This would increase the number of partitions and may not be used by the query.
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DP-203 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the DP-203 exam.