Databricks Exam Databricks-Certified-Professional-Data-Engineer Topic 2 Question 24 Discussion

Partitioning a Delta Lake table improves query performance by organizing data into partitions based on the values of a column. In the given schema, the date column is a good candidate for partitioning for several reasons:

Time-Based Queries: If queries frequently filter or group by date, partitioning by the date column can significantly improve performance by limiting the amount of data scanned.

Granularity: The date column likely has a granularity that leads to a reasonable number of partitions (not too many and not too few). This balance is important for optimizing both read and write performance.

Data Skew: Other columns like post_id or user_id might lead to uneven partition sizes (data skew), which can negatively impact performance.

Partitioning by post_time could also be considered, but typically date is preferred due to its more manageable granularity.

Delta Lake Documentation on Table Partitioning: Optimizing Layout with Partitioning