DP-900 Describe an analytics workload on Azure Practice Question
A company needs to run complex analytical queries that aggregate terabytes of sales data across multiple years. The queries are used for monthly business reports and are not latency-sensitive. The data is stored in Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. The company wants a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse solution that supports SQL queries and integrates with Power BI for reporting. Which Azure service should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Azure Analysis Services (an OLAP modeling tool) with a data warehouse, or assume HDInsight is suitable for SQL-based reporting, but Synapse is the only fully managed, petabyte-scale SQL data warehouse with native Power BI integration.
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 Synapse Analytics
Azure Synapse Analytics (formerly SQL Data Warehouse) is a fully managed, petabyte-scale analytics service that provides a dedicated SQL pool for running complex, high-performance T-SQL queries against massive datasets. It natively integrates with Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 for reading data directly via PolyBase or external tables, and it offers built-in connectors to Power BI for reporting. This makes it the ideal choice for the described workload, which requires large-scale aggregation without low-latency demands.
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 Synapse Analytics
Why this is correct
Azure Synapse Analytics provides a cloud-based data warehouse that can scale to petabytes. It uses dedicated SQL pools for high-performance analytical queries and has built-in integration with Power BI, Azure Data Lake Storage, and other Azure services.
- ✗
Azure Analysis Services
Why it's wrong here
Azure Analysis Services is an OLAP engine for creating semantic models that aggregate data from various sources. It is not a data warehouse itself; it requires a data source like Synapse or SQL Database to load data into memory for faster analysis.
- ✗
Azure Data Factory
Why it's wrong here
Azure Data Factory is a data integration and ETL service used to orchestrate data movement and transformation. It does not provide a data warehouse for querying; it is used to load data into a warehouse.
- ✗
Azure HDInsight
Why it's wrong here
Azure HDInsight is a managed big data platform for running open-source frameworks like Hadoop, Spark, and Hive. While Hive can provide SQL-like queries, it is not a fully managed data warehouse optimized for petabyte-scale analytics with Power BI integration out of the box.
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Data Roles and Core Concepts
Key term
Service
A service is a software component or system that performs a specific function and is available to be used by other programs or users over a network.
Key term
Azure Synapse Analytics
Azure Synapse Analytics is a cloud-based data integration, warehousing, and analytics service that brings together big data and data warehouse capabilities under one platform.
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