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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
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

2 questions in File Formats & Compaction.

  1. File Formats & Compaction advanced

    A lakehouse table takes 400 GB a day from a streaming job that commits every 60 seconds across 24 partitions. Daily compaction rewrites yesterday's data and a weekly job re-sorts the last 30 days. Roughly how much compute does that maintenance need, what share of the bill is it, and which assumption dominates the error?

    3 min answer compactionmaintenanceplanning-numberscost
  2. File Formats & Compaction advanced

    Review this configuration. A 60 TB events table is partitioned by ingest_date and written by a streaming job that commits every 60 seconds. A compaction job runs hourly over the last 24 hours with a 512 MB target and sorts each file by event_timestamp. Snapshot expiry runs monthly with 90-day retention. 85% of queries filter on customer_id over a 7-day range. What would you remove, what would you change and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer compactionsort keysnapshot expirystatistics