Quiz

2948 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 areas2948 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking96 API & Integration Architecture87 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering100 Security Architecture105 Cost Architecture & FinOps102 Business Architecture103 Architecture Communication102 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization102 AI-Era Architecture106 Software Architecture & Engineering93 Architecture Patterns94 Architecture Decision-Making101 The Architect's Meta-Skills102 Delivery & Release Engineering103 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience102 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data103 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture101 Edge, Mobile & IoT98 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture99 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98

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6 questions in Database Performance.

Quiz

A multi-tenant platform's database performance is fine for most tenants and severely degraded for a few. What are the likely causes and their fixes?

A query that ran in 40 ms has taken 40 seconds since Tuesday. The query and the code are unchanged. What happened?

A search product must choose between indexing throughput and query latency on the same hardware. How should the trade be made explicit and managed?

A voucher-redemption feature creates a single hot row that thousands of buyers hit in the same second. Compare row-level locking, optimistic concurrency, bucketed counters and an in-memory reservation service.

An application with ten million users has a database bottleneck. In what order do you intervene, and why is sharding last?

Review this proposal. A team has six slow queries against a 400 GB table taking 40,000 writes a minute, and proposes adding six indexes, one per query. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you keep?