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Quiz

126 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 areas126 Architecture Fundamentals2 Distributed Systems26 Data Architecture23 Cloud Architecture19 Networking3 API & Integration Architecture1 Reliability & Resilience4 Observability3 Performance & Capacity Engineering3 Security Architecture16 Cost Architecture & FinOps3 Business Architecture2 Architecture Communication2 Enterprise Architecture1 Legacy Modernization2 AI-Era Architecture3 Software Architecture & Engineering3 Architecture Patterns3 Architecture Decision-Making6 The Architect's Meta-Skills1
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

14 questions in Data Architecture.

  1. Change Data Capture advanced

    A downstream team needs to react to order changes. The order service can publish events, or they can consume CDC from its database. Which, and why?

    2 min answer cdceventscouplingintegration
  2. Data Architecture advanced

    A multi-tenant SaaS product has outgrown one database. You must shard. How do you choose the partition key, and what makes this decision so expensive to get wrong?

    2 min answer shardingpartitioningmulti-tenancyscaling
  3. Data Architecture advanced

    Discord stores trillions of messages. What is their partition key, and what problem does the second half of it solve?

    2 min answer case-studydiscordpartitioninghot-partition
  4. Data Architecture advanced

    Netflix personalises an entire home page in the time a TV takes to draw a screen. How, given that scoring every title for every member on request is impossible?

    2 min answer case-studynetflixprecomputationcqrs
  5. Data Architecture advanced Multiple choice

    Uber indexes the world with hexagons rather than squares for surge pricing and dispatch. Why does the shape matter, and what is the general lesson?

    2 min answer case-studyubergeospatialindexing
  6. Data Lakes & Lakehouses advanced

    You are asked to choose between a cloud data warehouse and a lakehouse for a new analytics platform. How do you decide?

    2 min answer lakehousewarehouselock-indecision-making
  7. Data Lifecycle & Retention advanced

    A GDPR erasure request arrives for a customer. Where does their data actually live, and what makes this expensive to retrofit?

    2 min answer gdprerasureprivacylifecycle
  8. Data Warehousing advanced

    A finance report double-counts revenue after a new fact table is added. What is the likely modelling error?

    2 min answer warehousegrainfan-outdimensional-modelling
  9. Event Sourcing advanced

    A team wants event sourcing for a new order service, citing audit requirements. What do you recommend?

    2 min answer event-sourcingauditdecision-making
  10. Polyglot Persistence advanced

    Four services want four different databases: Postgres, MongoDB, Cassandra and Neo4j. What do you say?

    2 min answer polyglotoperationsdecision-makingstandards
  11. Polyglot Persistence advanced

    Your search index and your database disagree — some products appear in search that were deleted, and some new ones never appear. How do you make this reliable?

    2 min answer consistencyindexingoutboxreconciliation
  12. Query Optimisation advanced

    A query that ran in 50ms for two years now takes 90 seconds. Nothing was deployed and the data volume grew normally. What happened?

    2 min answer plannerstatisticsplan-flipdiagnosis