Explanation
The answer is, They can increase the cluster size anywhere from 2X-Small to 4XL(Scale Up) to review the performance and select the size that meets your SLA. If you are trying to improve the performance of a single query at a time having additional memory, additional worker nodes mean that more tasks can run in a cluster which will improve the performance of that query.
The question is looking to test your ability to know how to scale a SQL Endpoint(SQL Warehouse) and you have to look for cue words or need to understand if the queries are running sequentially or concurrently. if the queries are running sequentially then scale up(Size of the cluster from 2X-Small to 4X-Large) if the queries are running concurrently or with more users then scale out(add more clusters).
SQL Endpoint(SQL Warehouse) Overview: (Please read all of the below points and the below diagram to understand )
1.A SQL Warehouse should have at least one cluster
2.A cluster comprises one driver node and one or many worker nodes
3.No of worker nodes in a cluster is determined by the size of the cluster (2X -Small ->1 worker, X-Small ->2 workers.... up to 4X-Large -> 128 workers) this is called Scale Up
4.A single cluster irrespective of cluster size(2X-Smal.. to ...4XLarge) can only run 10 queries at any given time if a user submits 20 queries all at once to a warehouse with 3X-Large cluster size and cluster scaling (min
1, max1) while 10 queries will start running the remaining 10 queries wait in a queue for these 10 to finish.
5.Increasing the Warehouse cluster size can improve the performance of a query, example if a query runs for 1 minute in a 2X-Small warehouse size, it may run in 30 Seconds if we change the warehouse size to X-Small.
this is due to 2X-Small has 1 worker node and X-Small has 2 worker nodes so the query has more tasks and runs faster (note: this is an ideal case example, the scalability of a query performance depends on many factors, it can not always be linear)
6.A warehouse can have more than one cluster this is called Scale Out. If a warehouse is configured with X-Small cluster size with cluster scaling(Min1, Max 2) Databricks spins up an additional cluster if it detects queries are waiting in the queue, If a warehouse is configured to run 2 clusters(Min1, Max 2), and let's say a user submits 20 queries, 10 queriers will start running and holds the remaining in the queue and databricks will automatically start the second cluster and starts redirecting the 10 queries waiting in the queue to the second cluster.
7.A single query will not span more than one cluster, once a query is submitted to a cluster it will remain in that cluster until the query execution finishes irrespective of how many clusters are available to scale.
Please review the below diagram to understand the above concepts:
Scale-up-> Increase the size of the SQL endpoint, change cluster size from 2X-Small to up to 4X-Large If you are trying to improve the performance of a single query having additional memory, additional worker nodes and cores will result in more tasks running in the cluster will ultimately improve the performance.
During the warehouse creation or after, you have the ability to change the warehouse size (2X-Small....to
...4XLarge) to improve query performance and the maximize scaling range to add more clusters on a SQL Endpoint(SQL Warehouse) scale-out if you are changing an existing warehouse you may have to restart the warehouse to make the changes effective.
