Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) Practice Exam

Which Azure offering allows creating data lake storage for big data analytics?

1. Azure Data Lake Storage

2. Azure Blob Storage

3. Azure Cosmos DB

4. Azure SQL Database

The correct answer is: Azure Data Lake Storage

Azure Data Lake Storage is specifically designed to support big data analytics with its unique scalability and cost-effectiveness. It provides a hierarchical namespace that allows for organizing data in a folder structure, making it easy to manage large volumes of data. This structuring is crucial for big data scenarios where efficient data management and retrieval are emphasized. Moreover, Azure Data Lake Storage is optimized to work with various analytics frameworks, including Apache Spark, Hadoop, and Azure Databricks. It supports massive data throughput and offers features such as fine-grained access control and the ability to store both structured and unstructured data, which are essential for advanced analytics. Other options, while they provide storage solutions, do not offer the same specialized features and capabilities for big data workloads. Azure Blob Storage, for example, is a general-purpose storage service that is great for storing large amounts of unstructured data but lacks the specific optimizations and hierarchical structures needed for data lake functionalities. Azure Cosmos DB and Azure SQL Database are more aligned with structured data and transactional processing rather than serving as a dedicated solution for big data analytics. Thus, Azure Data Lake Storage stands out as the ideal offering for creating data lakes tailored to big data analytics tasks.