Azure Data Engineer Interview Questions: Prepare for Your Next Data Engineering Job Interview

What is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure is a public cloud platform with more than 200 products and services built both for hardware and software. It comes with solutions that make managing a series of services and tools easier. 

What is the primary ETL service in Azure?

ETL is the same as extract, transform, and load in Azure Data factory. It  is a data pipeline that collects data from various sources and then transforms it according to business rules. 

What is Azure Data Factory?

Azure Data Factory is a platform meant to solve data scenarios. This cloud-based integration service helps you to create data-driven workflows to orchestrate data movement and transform data at scale. 

What is the difference between Azure Data Lake and Azure Data Warehouse?

A Data Lake is massive storage meant for structured and unstructured data. A data warehouse, on the other hand, is highly structured historical data that has a defined purpose. 

What is Polybase?

Polybase is a technology that optimizes data ingestion into PDW and supports T-SQL. It can access external data stored in Azure Blob storage or Azure Data Lake Store via the T-SQL language. 

How is the architecture of Azure Synapse Analytics designed? 

The Azure Synapse Analytics is designed to process massive data with hundreds of millions of rows in a table. With the help of Azure Synapse Analytics, you can scale your compute and storage levels separately and independently. 

What are Dedicated SQL Pools?

Dedicated SQL pools are the enterprise data warehousing features found in Azure Synapse Analytics. It comes with a collection of analytic resources provided when using Synapse SQL. 

What are the different types of storage in Azure?

Azure comes with 5 types of storage:

• Azure Blobs: Microsoft's object storage optimized for massive unstructured data.  

• Azure Queues: Microsoft's Azure Queues meant to store a massive amount of messages. 

• Azure Files: Microsoft's cloud storage solution for modern data storage scenarios. 

• Azure Disks: managed and used by Azure and Azure Virtual Machines. 

• Azure Tables: schemaless storage used as a NoSQL storage solution to store structured data. 

Explain the various windowing functions in Azure Stream Analytics

There are 5 windowing functions in Azure Stream Analytics: 

• Tumbling: consists of fixed-sized time intervals.

• Hopping: allows the data segments to overlap. 

• Sliding: starts to function when an event enters or exits the window. 

• Session: has 3 parameters: timeout, maximum duration, and partitioning key.

• Snapshot: groups event that has the same timestamp. 

What is Azure Databricks, and how does it differ from regular data bricks?

Azure Databricks is an open-source data analytics platform. It’s optimized for the Microsoft Azure cloud services and comes with 3 environments including Databricks SQL, Databricks data science and engineering, and Databricks machine learning.

What is data redundancy in Azure?

The data redundancy solutions accessible to Azure clients are: 

• Locally Redundant Storage: the data is duplicated in different racks between the same data center. 

• Zone Redundant Storage: ensures that the replication takes place across three Azure availability zones in the primary region.

• Geo-Redundant Storage: responsible for the data that’s duplicated across two regions. 

• Read Access Geo Redundant Storage: reads access to the data in the secondary region if there is a failure in the primary region. 

Why are you applying for the Azure Data Engineer role in our company? 

At this stage, you need to convince the interviewer of your importance in their company. So, make sure you are familiar with every detail of the job description and read some info about the company.  

What is your plan after joining this Data Engineer role? 

Freshers often come with creative ideas and interviewers look for such employees. They want to see if you are a problem-solving person ready to offer solutions in different situations. 

Do you have prior experience as a Data Engineer?

Show your past experience, certifications, achievements, and anything related to the role of a Data Engineer. If you don’t have any experience, it’s still ok. You can show some training you have attended or some impressive skills related to the job.