Question

A data engineer is setting up an Auto Loader stream to ingest JSON files that land continuously in an S3 bucket. The team wants Auto Loader to automatically detect the columns and their data types on the first run without manually specifying a schema, and to persist the inferred schema so subsequent runs remain consistent. Which configuration is required to enable this behavior?

Accepted Answer

Set the option 'cloudFiles.schemaLocation' to a durable storage path so Auto Loader can infer and store the schema.

Answer

Set 'cloudFiles.inferColumnTypes' to false and provide the schema inline with the .schema() method.

Answer

Enable 'cloudFiles.allowOverwrites' so that new files trigger a fresh schema calculation on every run.

Answer

Configure 'cloudFiles.maxFilesPerTrigger' to limit ingestion so the schema can be inferred incrementally.