What is the primary factor in deciding between ingesting a source into the lakehouse and federating queries to it?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
You decide by asking how fresh, how big, how often, and whether copies are allowed. Those needs beat where the system lives or what engines you have.
Full Explanation
The correct choice is the use case's latency, volume, and access-frequency requirements, balanced against constraints on copying the data. The decision is driven by requirements: how fresh the data must be, how much of it there is, how often it is queried, and whether policy or regulation permits a copy at all. Those factors determine whether the cost of movement or the cost of repeated remote access is the better trade.
The number of query engines currently provisioned on the platform is incorrect because engine count is a capacity matter, unrelated to where the data should live.
Whether the source system is on premises or in a cloud region is incorrect because location influences network cost but does not by itself decide the pattern; a nearby source can still be a copy-once candidate and a remote one can still be federated.
The file format the source system uses internally is incorrect because internal source formats are handled by the connector and are not a design driver.
For the exam, drive the choice from requirements, not from infrastructure inventory.