Databricks Certified Data Engineer - Associate

Explanation

In the Databricks Lakehouse architecture, the medallion architecture typically consists of three layers:

1. Bronze layer: Raw, unprocessed data ingested from source systems
2. Silver layer: Cleaned, validated, and enriched data
3. Gold layer: Aggregated, business-ready data for reporting and analytics

Why option D is correct:

• Silver tables contain less data than Bronze tables because during the transformation from Bronze to Silver:
  • Duplicate records are removed
  • Invalid or malformed data is filtered out
  • Data is deduplicated
  • Only relevant data is kept after cleaning

Why other options are incorrect:

• Option A: False - Silver tables contain MORE refined and cleaner data than Bronze tables
• Option B: False - Aggregation typically happens in the Gold layer, not Silver. Silver focuses on cleaning and validation
• Option C: False - Silver tables contain LESS data than Bronze tables due to data cleaning and filtering

Key insight: The transformation from Bronze to Silver reduces data volume through data quality improvements, making Silver tables smaller but higher quality than their Bronze counterparts.