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

Which Azure service is specifically designed for data analytics?

1. CosmosDB

2. BLOB Storage

3. Data Lake

4. SQL Database

The correct answer is: Data Lake

The service specifically designed for data analytics among the given options is Azure Data Lake. Azure Data Lake is a scalable and robust data storage and analytics service that facilitates large-scale data processing and analytics. It is designed to handle vast amounts of structured and unstructured data, making it ideal for big data analytics workloads. Data Lake allows users to store data in its native format, which can then be analyzed using various analytics tools and frameworks, such as Azure Databricks, HDInsight, and Azure Synapse Analytics. This capability to bring together and analyze data from various sources in a cost-effective manner is a key feature that sets it apart for data analytics tasks. In comparison, while CosmosDB provides a globally distributed database service suitable for handling various data formats and high throughput, it is not exclusively designed for analytics. BLOB Storage is primarily used for storing large amounts of unstructured data like files and images, and while it can be a part of an analytics pipeline, it does not offer the same level of analytics capability as Data Lake. SQL Database offers a relational data storage solution and can perform analytics tasks, but it is more suited for transactional data and does not scale as efficiently for large-scale analytical workloads compared to Data Lake.