Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional Exam - Topic 6 Question 46 Discussion

Actual exam question for Databricks's Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional exam

Question #: 46
Topic #: 6

[All Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional Questions]

Which statement describes Delta Lake Auto Compaction?

AAn asynchronous job runs after the write completes to detect if files could be further compacted; if yes, an optimize job is executed toward a default of 1 GB.

BBefore a Jobs cluster terminates, optimize is executed on all tables modified during the most recent job.

COptimized writes use logical partitions instead of directory partitions; because partition boundaries are only represented in metadata, fewer small files are written.

DData is queued in a messaging bus instead of committing data directly to memory; all data is committed from the messaging bus in one batch once the job is complete.

EAn asynchronous job runs after the write completes to detect if files could be further compacted; if yes, an optimize job is executed toward a default of 128 MB.

Show Suggested Answer

Suggested Answer: E

This is the correct answer because it describes the behavior of Delta Lake Auto Compaction, which is a feature that automatically optimizes the layout of Delta Lake tables by coalescing small files into larger ones. Auto Compaction runs as an asynchronous job after a write to a table has succeeded and checks if files within a partition can be further compacted. If yes, it runs an optimize job with a default target file size of 128 MB. Auto Compaction only compacts files that have not been compacted previously. Verified Reference: [Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional], under ''Delta Lake'' section; Databricks Documentation, under ''Auto Compaction for Delta Lake on Databricks'' section.

'Auto compaction occurs after a write to a table has succeeded and runs synchronously on the cluster that has performed the write. Auto compaction only compacts files that haven't been compacted previously.'

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/databricks/delta/tune-file-size

by Tegan at Apr 04, 2026, 09:26 AM

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Truman

1 hour ago

I think Delta Lake Auto Compaction involves some kind of asynchronous job, but I'm not sure if it's 1 GB or 128 MB for the optimize job.

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