Question

A data engineer is designing a Silver Delta table for e-commerce events. Queries almost always filter on the event date, but the source only provides an event_timestamp column of type TIMESTAMP. The engineer wants the table to be physically partitioned by date without requiring downstream writers to manually compute and populate a separate date column on every insert. Which approach best satisfies this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Define a generated column, e.g. event_date DATE GENERATED ALWAYS AS (CAST(event_timestamp AS DATE)), and partition the table by event_date.

Answer

Partition the table directly by event_timestamp so Delta automatically buckets rows into daily folders.

Answer

Create a regular event_date column and require every writer to include a CAST(event_timestamp AS DATE) expression in each INSERT statement.

Answer

Run OPTIMIZE with ZORDER BY (event_timestamp) instead of partitioning to physically organize data by date.