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Quiz

2707 questions of the kind that actually get asked — in interviews, in architecture review boards, and by the person who has to run the thing at 3 AM. Every answer states the trade-off rather than the slogan, and says when the obvious choice is the wrong one.

All areas2707 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering84 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making91 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering93 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture90 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

51 questions in Data Platform Architecture.

  1. Storage Layout & Partitioning advanced

    An analytical query scans far more data than it needs. Before adding compute, what layout decisions should be examined?

    2 min answer meeshopartitioningclusteringfile-size
  2. Transformation Frameworks advanced

    A transformation project has grown to 600 models with chains twelve deep. A change at the base has an unknowable blast radius. What do you do?

    2 min answer data-platformtransformationmodellingmaintainability
  3. Transformation Frameworks advanced

    A transformation project has grown to hundreds of models with a build taking hours. What structural problems produce that, and what fixes them?

    2 min answer dbt-labsdagincrementalmodularity
  4. Transformation Frameworks advanced

    Your transformation project has 2,400 models. A full build takes six hours and one change rebuilds half the graph. How did this happen and what do you do?

    2 min answer eltmodellingmaintainability
  5. Warehouse, Lake & Lakehouse advanced

    A retail client needs BI dashboards for 400 concurrent users and a data science platform over the same data. One lakehouse or a lakehouse plus a serving layer?

    2 min answer lakehousearchitectureconcurrency
  6. Warehouse, Lake & Lakehouse advanced

    Datadog has published the design of Husky, its third-generation event store, which splits writers, readers and compactors into independently scaled services over a shared metadata store and commodity object storage rather than running one storage tier. What problem forces that separation, and where would copying it be a mistake?

    2 min answer datadoghuskycompactioncolumnar
  7. Warehouse, Lake & Lakehouse advanced

    Leadership wants to consolidate a warehouse, a data lake and three departmental marts into a lakehouse. How do you scope and sequence this?

    2 min answer data-platformmigrationlakehousestrategy
  8. Warehouse Migration advanced

    A retail company is migrating its warehouse to a new platform. What makes these migrations fail, and what sequence reduces the risk?

    2 min answer myntramigrationparityconsumers
  9. Warehouse Migration advanced

    An organisation is migrating from a legacy data warehouse to a modern platform. How should it be sequenced, and why do these migrations so often end with both systems running permanently?

    2 min answer migrationwarehousedecommissioningparallel-run
  10. Warehouse Migration advanced

    An organisation migrates its warehouse to a new platform. What dominates the effort, and what makes these migrations fail?

    2 min answer warehouse-migrationtransformation-logicconsumersverification
  11. Warehouse Migration advanced

    During a warehouse migration parallel run, 40 reports produce different numbers on the new platform. How do you proceed?

    2 min answer migrationreconciliationstakeholders
  12. Warehouse Migration advanced

    Your analytics platform ingests change data from an operational estate that was split into 480 logical shards in 2021 and then spread across a larger number of physical database hosts in 2023, the arrangement Notion has described publicly. Your connectors, offsets and target tables are all configured per host. What does that physical move do to the downstream pipeline, and what design turns the next one into a configuration change rather than a re-ingest?

    3 min answer notionshardingcdcingestion contract