Databricks Certified Data Engineer - Associate

Explanation

In Databricks/Spark SQL, there are two types of tables:

1. Managed Tables (also called internal tables):

   • The data is managed by the metastore
   • Both the metadata AND the data files are stored within the system
   • When you drop a managed table using DROP TABLE, both the metadata AND the underlying data files are deleted

2. External Tables:

   • Only the metadata is managed by the metastore
   • The data files are stored in an external location (like S3, ADLS, etc.)
   • When you drop an external table using DROP TABLE, only the metadata is deleted, but the underlying data files remain intact

In this scenario, since both the data files and metadata files were deleted when running DROP TABLE IF EXISTS my_table;, this indicates that the table was a managed table.

Key points:

• Option A is correct because managed tables have their data lifecycle managed by the metastore
• Option D (external table) is incorrect because external tables only delete metadata, not data files
• Options B and C (data size) are irrelevant to whether files are deleted
• Option E is incorrect because all tables have a location (either managed by the system or specified by the user)

Additional context:

• Managed tables are created without specifying a location or using CREATE TABLE without the LOCATION clause
• External tables are created using CREATE TABLE ... LOCATION 'path' or CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE syntax
• The IF EXISTS clause simply prevents an error if the table doesn't exist, but doesn't affect the deletion behavior