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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

35 questions in Data Governance & Semantics.

  1. Reference Data intermediate

    A reference data set of branch codes is maintained by an operations team. A branch closes in March and its code is retired. In September the code is assigned to a new branch in another city. Six months later finance asks why one branch's historical performance looks impossible. What happens across the estate?

    2 min answer reference-dataidentifiershistoryjoins
  2. Reference Data intermediate

    Tax rates change annually and must apply from a specific date. How do you manage that across a dozen systems?

    2 min answer reference-dataversioningeffective-datesdistribution
  3. Retention & Purge intermediate

    A subject erasure request arrives for one customer. Their rows sit in a lakehouse table of 4 billion rows in 1,100 partitions, with 30 days of snapshot retention, plus a search index and two downstream marts. Roughly what does honouring it cost, and which assumption dominates?

    3 min answer gdprerasureimmutabilitysnapshots
  4. Self-Service vs Governed intermediate

    A 90-person company has a data catalogue, a business glossary, a stewardship council meeting fortnightly, a dataset certification process and an access-request workflow with two approvers. Twelve people work with data. Review it — what would you remove, what would you change and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer governanceover-engineeringself-serviceapprovals
  5. Self-Service vs Governed intermediate

    A data team is asked to enable self-service analytics while ensuring numbers are trustworthy. How should the boundary be drawn?

    2 min answer amplitudeself-servicegovernancesemantic-layer
  6. Self-Service vs Governed intermediate

    How do you let analysts work freely without ending up with five conflicting versions of the same number?

    2 min answer self-servicetiersgovernancelabelling
  7. Semantic Layer intermediate

    A company adopts a central semantic layer so that "active customer" has one definition everywhere. Two years later analysts route around it. What did the organisation buy and what did it pay?

    2 min answer semantic layermetricsgovernancebottleneck
  8. Sensitivity Labelling intermediate

    A design platform holds user-generated content, customer brand assets and internal data in one estate. How should sensitivity labelling work so it is actually applied?

    1 min answer classificationlabellingautomationpolicy
  9. Sensitivity Labelling intermediate

    An insurer must classify data sensitivity across a growing estate. What makes classification work rather than becoming a stale register?

    2 min answer digitclassificationautomationenforcement
  10. Tokenisation & Masking intermediate Multiple choice

    A marketplace must stop storing raw phone numbers in its analytical estate. Analysts still need to join orders to support tickets by the same customer, and the company must be able to delete an individual's data on request. Which approach fits?

    2 min answer tokenisationhashingerasurejoinability
  11. Tokenisation & Masking intermediate

    Customer phone numbers are replaced with vault-issued tokens at ingest, and the four services allowed to see raw values call the vault to detokenise on demand. The vault becomes slow rather than down - p99 goes from 8 ms to 4 seconds - for three hours during the evening peak. What happens across the estate, and what stops it?

    3 min answer tokenisationvaultavailability-couplingtimeouts