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Quiz

2667 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 areas2667 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 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

993 questions.

  1. Data Stewardship intermediate

    A newsroom's data stewardship programme has stewards named for every dataset and almost no stewardship happening. What would you change?

    1 min answer stewardshipownershipincentivesoperating-model
  2. Data Stewardship intermediate

    After a year of stewards in name only, a company funds the role properly: 18 stewards at 20% of their time, written into objectives, with authority to refuse an access request. Two quarters later definitions are current and the analytics team is complaining loudly. What did the organisation buy, what is it paying, and when does that bill arrive?

    2 min answer data stewardshipdecision rightsaccess requestsqueue time
  3. Data Stewardship intermediate

    Review this stewardship design. Every one of 1,200 tables has a named steward drawn from the business. Stewards approve access requests, maintain descriptions in the catalogue and attend a monthly forum. After a year, 30% of descriptions are filled in, access approvals take nine days and the forum has six regular attendees. What would you change and what would you keep?

    2 min answer stewardshipgovernanceoperating-modelincentives
  4. Data Subject Rights intermediate

    A regulator asks how long after an erasure request the data is genuinely gone. Production deletes in seconds; backups are daily with 35-day retention; the warehouse is fed by change data capture; the search index rebuilds weekly; three processors hold copies. Roughly what number do you give and what does it rule out?

    2 min answer erasurebackupssuppression-listcdc
  5. 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
  6. Data Virtualisation intermediate

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

    2 min answer virtualisationfederationcouplingload
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. Database Migration Under CD intermediate

    A release must rename a heavily used database column and ships tonight. The team proposes doing the rename in the deployment. What is wrong, and what do you propose?

    2 min answer migrationrollbackschemacontinuous-delivery
  10. Database Migration Under CD intermediate Multiple choice

    A superapp in the mould of Grab renames a column using expand and contract. The rolling deploy of the 240-pod service takes 11 minutes. A batch consumer reads a cached schema descriptor with a 1-hour TTL. A worker fleet is draining a 6-hour backlog of jobs serialised against the old shape. Mobile clients hold the old field name until users update. Roughly how long must both shapes stay correct before the contract step is safe?

    3 min answer grabexpand-and-contractschema-migrationmobile-clients
  11. Database Migration Under CD intermediate

    A team deploys several times a day and needs to change a database schema. What sequence prevents downtime, and which step is skipped?

    2 min answer chargebeemigrationexpand-contractbackfill
  12. Dead Letter Handling intermediate

    A streaming pipeline sends failed messages to a dead-letter queue. What makes that a real control rather than a data-loss mechanism?

    2 min answer segmentdead-letterpoisonownership