DP-900 Describe an analytics workload on Azure Practice Question
Which TWO Azure services can be used to perform data transformation in an analytics pipeline? (Choose two.)
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse storage services (Data Lake Storage) or ingestion services (Event Hubs) with transformation services, or assume that visualization tools like Power BI can perform data transformation, when in fact they only consume pre-transformed data.
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 Data Factory
Azure Data Factory is a cloud-based ETL service that allows you to create data pipelines to transform data at scale using mapping data flows or by invoking external compute services like Azure Databricks. It supports code-free visual transformations as well as custom code via Azure HDInsight or Databricks, making it a core service for data transformation in analytics pipelines.
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 Data Lake Storage Gen2
Why it's wrong here
Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 is a hierarchical, blob-based storage service designed to hold massive amounts of structured and unstructured data as files. It provides the underlying storage layer for analytics workloads but lacks compute engines or pipeline capabilities to perform data transformations. While data can be read from and written to it by transformation services, it does not natively support any transformation logic itself.
- ✗
Azure Event Hubs
Why it's wrong here
Azure Event Hubs is a real-time data ingestion and streaming platform that receives and processes millions of events per second from connected devices and applications. Its primary role is to collect, buffer, and deliver event streams to downstream consumers, not to reshape or enrich the data. It does not include built-in transformation features such as mapping data flows or scripted jobs, so it cannot be used to perform data transformation on its own.
- ✓
Azure Data Factory
Why this is correct
Azure Data Factory is a cloud-based data integration service that enables the creation of ETL and ELT pipelines, orchestrating data movement and transformation across many sources and destinations. It offers Mapping Data Flows, which provide a visual, code-free interface for performing scalable transformations like joins, aggregations, and pivots, as well as the ability to call external compute services for more complex logic. This makes it a dedicated and correct choice for data transformation tasks.
- ✗
Power BI
Why it's wrong here
Power BI is a business analytics and visualization tool used for creating interactive dashboards and reports, with Power Query and DAX allowing basic data shaping within its desktop application. However, its transformation capabilities are designed for in-memory report preparation rather than large-scale, server-side data processing or reusable pipeline transformations. Since Power BI is primarily for analysis and presentation, it is not a suitable service for performing general data transformation workloads.
- ✓
Azure Databricks
Why this is correct
Azure Databricks is an Apache Spark-based analytics platform that offers a collaborative workspace for running data engineering and data science workloads. It supports complex data transformations through notebooks and Spark jobs, allowing code-first processing using Python, Scala, SQL, and R, plus streaming and batch data flows. This makes it a powerful, scalable service for performing transformation tasks, from simple cleanses to advanced machine learning preprocessing.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
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
Data transformation
Data transformation is the process of converting data from one format, structure, or value into another to make it usable for analysis, storage, or reporting.
About these practice questions
This DP-900 question is part of Courseiva's 820-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
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.