DP-900 Describe core data concepts Practice Question
A marketing team needs to analyze customer sentiment from social media posts in real time. The solution must ingest a stream of tweets, perform sentiment analysis using a pre-built AI model, and store the results in a dashboard for immediate visualization. The team has limited coding experience and prefers a low-code/no-code approach. Which combination of Azure services should you recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates choose Azure Functions (Option A) thinking it's serverless and low-code, but it actually requires writing code for sentiment analysis, whereas Azure Stream Analytics provides a true low-code/no-code solution with built-in ML capabilities.
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 Stream Analytics, and Power BI
Azure Event Hubs ingests the real-time tweet stream, Azure Stream Analytics performs sentiment analysis using its built-in machine learning functions (a low-code/no-code approach), and Power BI provides the dashboard for immediate visualization. This combination meets the real-time, low-code requirement without custom coding.
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 Event Hubs, Azure Functions, and Azure Cosmos DB
Why it's wrong here
This stack requires custom code: Azure Functions would need to implement sentiment analysis logic, typically by calling the Text Analytics API in a hand-written function, and then writing results to Cosmos DB. Cosmos DB is a NoSQL database, not a dashboard or visualization service, so you would still have to build a separate Power BI or web dashboard. The lack of a built-in, low-code sentiment analysis function and the missing direct output to a real-time dashboard make this option operationally heavy and not aligned with the 'low-code' premise.
- ✗
Azure IoT Hub, Azure Data Factory, and Power BI
Why it's wrong here
Azure IoT Hub is specifically designed for bi-directional communication with IoT devices, not for ingesting social media or generic streaming data, so it is the wrong ingestion service. Azure Data Factory is a batch-oriented ETL/ELT tool that moves and transforms data on a schedule, not a real-time stream processing engine, so it cannot perform continuous sentiment analysis on a live event stream. While Power BI can display results, this combination fails to provide the required real-time, low-code sentiment analysis pipeline.
- ✓
Azure Event Hubs, Azure Stream Analytics, and Power BI
Why this is correct
Azure Event Hubs is the correct streaming ingestion service for high-throughput social media events. Azure Stream Analytics provides a serverless, low-code SQL-based query engine that can natively call the built-in sentiment analysis function (which uses Azure Cognitive Services under the hood) on incoming messages, and it can send results directly to Power BI as a streaming output. This creates a seamless, real-time dashboard experience without requiring custom code or separate data stores.
- ✗
Azure Event Hubs, Azure HDInsight, and Power BI
Why it's wrong here
Azure HDInsight (e.g., Spark or Storm) is a managed big data cluster that, while capable of stream processing, demands significant coding in Java, Python, or Scala and manual cluster configuration and scaling. This introduces operational overhead and development complexity that contradicts the low-code, fast-to-deploy requirement. Even though Event Hubs and Power BI are correct pieces, the HDInsight element makes the pipeline expensive and highly technical, whereas Azure Stream Analytics would replace it with a far simpler, fully managed option.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Analytics and Data Warehouse Concepts
Key term
Azure Stream Analytics
Azure Stream Analytics is a fully managed, real-time data processing service that analyzes and transforms high volumes of streaming data from various sources to deliver low-latency insights and trigger actions.
Key term
Dashboard
A dashboard is a visual display of key metrics and data points that helps IT professionals monitor, analyze, and manage systems or processes in real time.
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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.