DP-900 Describe core data concepts Practice Question
A company ingests streaming data from social media feeds and needs to process and analyze the data in real time. Which Azure service should they use to capture the stream?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse Azure Stream Analytics (a processing service) with Event Hubs (an ingestion service), or assume IoT Hub is suitable for non-IoT streaming data due to its similar event ingestion capability.
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
✓
Azure Event Hubs
Azure Event Hubs is a fully managed, real-time data ingestion service designed to capture and process millions of events per second from sources like social media feeds. It provides a scalable, low-latency endpoint for streaming data, making it the correct choice for capturing the stream before further analysis.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Azure Stream Analytics
Why it's wrong here
Azure Stream Analytics is a serverless processing and analytics engine, not an ingestion service. It executes continuous SQL queries over data that already resides in an ingestion endpoint such as Event Hubs or IoT Hub, enabling real-time pattern detection and alerting. Because it cannot directly accept inbound social media events from external feeds, it fails the requirement to ingest the streaming data.
- ✗
Azure IoT Hub
Why it's wrong here
Azure IoT Hub is optimized for bidirectional communication with IoT devices, using device identities, device twins, and device-to-cloud telemetry routing. Social media APIs do not present themselves as IoT devices, and IoT Hub's device-specific authentication model is not designed for open, public event publishers. Thus, it is not the correct general-purpose event collection service for this scenario.
- ✓
Azure Event Hubs
Why this is correct
Azure Event Hubs is a fully managed, highly scalable event ingestion service that accepts millions of events per second from diverse publishers, including social media APIs. It provides partitioned streams with configurable retention, enabling multiple independent consumers to read the same events through separate consumer groups. Its AMQP and Kafka-compatible endpoints make it the standard real-time ingestion front door for high-volume social media feeds.
- ✗
Azure Data Lake Storage
Why it's wrong here
Azure Data Lake Storage is a hierarchical, massively scalable filesystem for storing petabyte-scale data at rest, not a real-time data ingestion pipeline. Social media events would first need to be captured by a service like Event Hubs and then written to Data Lake Storage as files, such as Parquet or ORC, for downstream analytics. Selecting it for ingestion conflates the storage destination with the collection mechanism.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Data Roles and Core Concepts
Key term
Data ingestion
Data ingestion is the process of moving data from various sources into a storage system where it can be accessed, analyzed, and used.
Key term
Data
Data is raw, unprocessed information, like numbers, words, or measurements, that can be stored, processed, and analyzed by computers.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DP-900 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-900 exam.