Data Engineering Associate with Databricks Practice Exam 2025 - Free Databricks Practice Questions and Study Guide

The function used to generate the current timestamp in SQL is the one that retrieves the system's current date and time. This function is essential for time-sensitive operations, wherenever you need to log or track the timing of events within a database.

The correct function, Current_timestamp(), returns the current date and time in the format of a timestamp, which is useful for inserting time data into tables, performing time-based comparisons, and more. It provides a precise measure of when a particular operation occurs, which can be crucial in applications such as logging, analytics, and transaction management.

The other options serve different functions: Input_file_name() retrieves the name of the file being read in a data processing job, Filter() is used to filter records from a dataset based on given criteria, and Collect_set() aggregates unique values from a dataset into a set. Therefore, none of these options fulfill the requirement of generating the current timestamp as effectively as Current_timestamp() does.