DP-600 Maintain a Data Analytics Solution Practice Question
A Microsoft Fabric capacity is frequently experiencing 'Interactive Delay' during peak hours. You need to implement maintenance strategies to mitigate this without increasing the SKU size. Which TWO strategies should you prioritize?
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
✓
Schedule large Warehouse and Lakehouse refreshes during off-peak hours.
Managing capacity performance is essential for maintaining a responsive analytics environment. Interactive delays occur when the capacity is over-utilized, and the system throttles new requests. By optimizing the distribution of background tasks and improving query efficiency, engineers can maximize the utility of their current SKU and ensure that high-priority interactive reports remain performant.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Schedule large Warehouse and Lakehouse refreshes during off-peak hours.
Why this is correct
Background operations like data refreshes consume capacity units that are smoothed over a 24-hour period. However, if too many occur simultaneously, they can contribute to the overall exhaustion of the capacity. Moving these tasks to quiet periods reduces the peak load, leaving more headroom for interactive user queries.
- ✓
Review and optimize long-running DAX queries in the most popular reports.
Why this is correct
Interactive operations are smoothed over a much shorter window (typically 5 minutes). Efficient DAX reduces the immediate CPU load of each report interaction. By optimizing these queries, you decrease the 'burst' consumption, which is the primary cause of interactive delays and the resulting poor user experience during busy times.
- ✗
Enable 'DirectQuery' for all semantic models to reduce memory load.
Why it's wrong here
DirectQuery can actually increase the load on both the capacity and the source systems because it generates queries for every visual interaction. While it saves memory, it significantly increases the CPU usage required to translate and execute those queries. This often worsens interactive delays rather than mitigating them.
- ✗
Increase the 'Refresh Frequency' of all reports to ensure data freshness.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing refresh frequency directly increases the total capacity units consumed by background operations. This would likely lead to more frequent throttling and delays. Maintenance should focus on finding the right balance between data freshness and available resources, rather than maximizing refresh cycles without considering the impact.
- ✗
Disable the 'Smoothing' feature in the Fabric Admin portal.
Why it's wrong here
Smoothing is a built-in architectural feature of Fabric capacity that cannot be disabled by users. It is designed to help handle spikes in demand by spreading the cost of operations over time. Attempting to change this (if it were possible) would likely make performance even more volatile.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Microsoft exam blueprint
This DP-600 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-600 exam.