DP-100 Coursera Course Contains Severely Outdated Databricks Notebooks (Spark 2.3 / DBR 4.0 Code)

Hello Microsoft Training Support Team,

I’m preparing for the DP-100: Designing and Implementing a Data Science Solution on Azure certification and I’m using the official Microsoft course on Coursera titled “Perform Data Science with Azure Databricks”. Unfortunately, the Databricks notebooks included in this course appear to be extremely outdated and are no longer compatible with modern Azure Databricks environments.

Summary of the Issue

The provided notebooks rely on:

• Apache Spark 2.3

Databricks Runtime 4.x

Deprecated APIs such as SparkServerContext, legacy AttributionContext, and old Databricks logging classes

Deprecated dbutils.fs.mount patterns that no longer work with modern identity / storage access models

Legacy WASBS SAS workflows that predate current Azure Storage security

Hard-coded AWS access keys (!)

Databricks Academy backend services that no longer exist

These notebooks cannot be executed on any current Azure Databricks runtime, including DBR 11+ or ML runtimes.

Example

Here is an excerpt from one of the initialization notebooks (this is the code required before any lab can begin):

assertDbrVersion(4, 0)
assertSparkVersion(2, 3)
val version = com.databricks.spark.util.SparkServerContext.serverVersion.replace("dbr-", "")
...
dbutils.fs.mount(source, mountPoint)

This code can only run on runtimes and APIs that were retired years ago.

Impact

Labs cannot be completed as written

Exercises fail during environment setup

Learners are exposed to obsolete Databricks architectures

The material no longer aligns with current DP-100 exam objectives

Multiple other learners on Coursera have reported the same issues, and Coursera support confirmed they cannot update Microsoft-authored content.

Request

Could the responsible Microsoft content team review this course and update or retire the outdated Databricks modules?

I’m happy to provide:

The full notebook source

Cluster logs

Specific failing cells

Version mismatch details

Thank you for helping maintain the quality of Microsoft’s certification content.

Duc.

Moved from: Azure | Azure Training