Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate — Question 67

A data engineer has developed a data pipeline to ingest data from a JSON source using Auto Loader, but the engineer has not provided any type inference or schema hints in their pipeline. Upon reviewing the data, the data engineer has noticed that all of the columns in the target table are of the string type despite some of the fields only including float or boolean values.

Why has Auto Loader inferred all of the columns to be of the string type?

Answer options

• A. Auto Loader cannot infer the schema of ingested data
• B. JSON data is a text-based format
• C. Auto Loader only works with string data
• D. All of the fields had at least one null value

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Auto Loader infers the schema based on the data it processes. Since JSON is a text-based format, all data is treated as strings unless specified otherwise, leading to all columns being inferred as string types. The other options do not accurately describe the behavior of Auto Loader or the nature of JSON data.