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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

39 questions in Data Platform Architecture.

  1. Analytics Cost Control intermediate

    An analytical platform's cost has grown faster than its usage. Which controls actually reduce it?

    2 min answer snowflakecostauto-suspendlayout
  2. Analytics Cost Control intermediate

    An analytics platform's cost is growing faster than its usage. What causes it, and which controls work without blocking analysts?

    2 min answer costwarehousepruninggovernance
  3. Analytics Cost Control intermediate

    One analyst's query cost £4,000 in a single afternoon. Leadership wants a policy. What do you actually implement?

    1 min answer finopswarehouseguardrails
  4. Analytics Cost Control intermediate

    The analytics bill has tripled in six months with no corresponding growth in users or data volume. Where do you look?

    1 min answer finopsanalyticscostgovernance
  5. CDC Pipeline Design intermediate

    You are sizing the Kafka topic behind a CDC pipeline. The source Postgres takes about 12 million row changes a day across 40 tables, the average row is about 1.2 KB, the connector emits before and after images plus metadata, and the platform team wants 7 days of retention so a failed consumer can be rebuilt without a new snapshot. Roughly how much broker storage, and which assumption dominates the error?

    3 min answer cdckafkacapacity planningretention
  6. Data Virtualisation intermediate

    A federation layer serves 60 analysts across four sources: the lakehouse, a Postgres replica, a managed warehouse and a SaaS REST connector. At 11:40 the REST connector's upstream begins answering in 40 seconds rather than 200 ms. Nothing errors and nothing is down. Walk through what happens to the other analysts over the next ten minutes.

    3 min answer federationhead-of-line blockingbulkheadsconcurrency
  7. Data Virtualisation intermediate

    A group holds customer data in separate EU and US entities, and the rows may not be copied across the border. The board wants one revenue dashboard. The team puts a federation layer over both regions and queries in place rather than consolidating. What has that bought, when does the bill arrive, and how do they keep the option to reverse it?

    2 min answer federationresidencypushdowncross-region
  8. Data Virtualisation intermediate

    A platform proposes querying operational databases directly rather than copying data. When does that work?

    2 min answer virtualisationfederationcouplingload
  9. Dimensional Modelling intermediate Multiple choice

    A BI team replaces a 9-table star schema with a single denormalised table of 240 columns because dashboards were slow and analysts kept joining at the wrong grain. Six months later the table is 4 TB across roughly 3 billion rows, the nightly build takes 5 hours, and correcting one product's category requires a full rebuild. Which property did the flattening actually trade away?

    3 min answer one big tabledenormalisationscdrebuild cost
  10. Dimensional Modelling intermediate

    When is dimensional modelling still the right approach, and what does it cost?

    2 min answer dimensional-modellingstar-schemausabilityperformance
  11. File Formats & Compaction intermediate

    A lakehouse team raises its compaction target file size from 128 MB to 1 GB and switches the write codec from Snappy to Zstandard. Query cost falls. What did they give up, and when does that bill arrive?

    2 min answer datadogcompactionparquetzstd
  12. File Formats & Compaction intermediate

    A platform's analytical queries slow steadily over months with no change in data volume per day. What is happening?

    2 min answer small-filescompactionformatsmetadata