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Quiz

2627 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 areas2627 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture77 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture85 Cost Architecture & FinOps82 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization82 AI-Era Architecture86 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 Architecture88 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics81 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk88
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

30 questions in Data Architecture.

  1. Data Warehousing intermediate

    An analytics platform separates compute from storage. What does that actually buy architecturally, and what problems does it not solve?

    2 min answer snowflakecompute-storageisolationconcurrency
  2. Data Warehousing intermediate

    Finance and marketing report different revenue for the same month from the same warehouse. Where do you look and what would have prevented it?

    2 min answer warehouseconformed-dimensionsdefinitionswalmart
  3. ETL & ELT intermediate

    A grocery platform ingests catalogue and inventory feeds from hundreds of retailers, each with different formats, quality and update frequency. Should transformation happen before loading or after, and where should data quality be enforced?

    2 min answer etleltdata-qualityingestion
  4. ETL & ELT intermediate

    A nightly pipeline failed halfway and the retry produced duplicate rows. Walk me through fixing this properly.

    2 min answer idempotencypipelinesbackfillcorrectness
  5. Indexing intermediate Multiple choice

    A query filters on `lower(email)` and there is an index on `email`. The query is slow and the plan shows a sequential scan. Why, and what are the fixes?

    2 min answer indexingquery-plandebuggingdatabase
  6. Indexing intermediate

    A table has 14 indexes and writes have become slow. How do you decide which to remove?

    2 min answer indexingwrite-performancereview
  7. NoSQL Stores intermediate

    A team needs a store for derived data that is bulk-loaded from offline jobs, updated in real time, and read at very low latency. Why does this workload get its own system rather than reusing the primary online database?

    2 min answer airbnbmusselderived-datakey-value
  8. NoSQL Stores intermediate Multiple choice

    A team proposes replacing PostgreSQL with a document store because "it scales better". Current load is 800 writes per second. What is your response?

    2 min answer nosqlrelationalamazondynamo
  9. NoSQL Stores intermediate

    A team wants to move a workload from PostgreSQL to a document store because "the schema keeps changing". What do you ask?

    2 min answer nosqlschemamigrationdecision-making
  10. Partitioning & Sharding intermediate Multiple choice

    A marketplace's product database has become the bottleneck for a read-heavy workload. The team proposes sharding immediately. What lower-complexity options should be exhausted first, and in what order?

    2 min answer meeshoshardingread-heavyoptimisation
  11. Polyglot Persistence intermediate

    A developer platform accumulates a relational database, an object store, a search index, a cache, a queue and a time-series store. When is this justified polyglot persistence, and when is it accidental sprawl?

    2 min answer polyglot-persistenceoperational-costconsolidationgitlab
  12. Polyglot Persistence intermediate

    A team wants to add a graph database for a "people you may know" feature. The system currently runs on one PostgreSQL instance. Evaluate.

    2 min answer polyglotgraphoperationsnetflix