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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. Slowly Changing Dimensions intermediate

    A retail platform's product attributes change over time, and historical reports must reflect the values as they were. What modelling approach handles this?

    2 min answer nykaascdhistorydimensional
  2. Slowly Changing Dimensions intermediate Multiple choice

    The business asks why the regional sales report changed for a period that closed six months ago. What happened, and what is the fix?

    2 min answer dimensional-modellinghistorycorrectness
  3. Storage Layout & Partitioning intermediate Multiple choice

    A 4 TB events table serves three query patterns: 80% ask for one tenant over the last 7 days, 15% look up a single event by id, and 5% scan one product across all history. The table currently has no partitioning. Which layout should the team adopt?

    2 min answer partitioningclusteringcardinalitylayout
  4. Storage Layout & Partitioning intermediate

    A 6 TB events table is partitioned by `customer_id`. Queries are slow and the storage layer complains. What is wrong?

    2 min answer partitioningperformancedesign
  5. Transformation Frameworks intermediate

    A platform adopts a transformation framework and analysts build hundreds of models. What governance is needed to prevent a tangle?

    2 min answer transformationmodellinggovernancetesting
  6. Transformation Frameworks intermediate

    Review this transformation project. 300 models are all views with no materialisations and chains up to 11 deep. Every model has not-null and unique tests on every column - about 2400 tests. CI runs a full build plus the whole test suite on every pull request - 70 minutes. Each developer has a personal schema. What would you remove, what would you change and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer dbtviewsmaterialisationtesting
  7. Warehouse, Lake & Lakehouse intermediate

    How should a platform decide between a warehouse, a lake and a lakehouse for a given workload?

    2 min answer warehouselakelakehouseworkload-fit
  8. Warehouse, Lake & Lakehouse intermediate

    Notion runs its product on sharded Postgres and originally loaded analytics into a managed warehouse through off-the-shelf connectors. In 2022 it built its own data lake on change data capture into Kafka, Hudi tables and S3 instead. What forced that, and where would copying it be a mistake?

    2 min answer notionhudicdclakehouse
  9. Workflow Schedulers intermediate

    An interviewer says - we run one orchestrator with about 4,000 tasks a night, all written by the platform team. Leadership wants to open it to 12 product teams as self-service so they stop queueing behind us. Where do you take this?

    3 min answer orchestrationmulti-tenancyquotaspaved path
  10. Workflow Schedulers intermediate

    Every task in the data platform sits in a queued state. Worker CPU is around 6%, the metadata database is healthy, the task logs show nothing, and no task has failed. Someone proposes adding workers. What do you look at first, and what is probably happening?

    2 min answer airflowschedulersconcurrencysensors
  11. Workflow Schedulers intermediate

    What should be evaluated when choosing a workflow scheduler for a data platform?

    2 min answer schedulersdependenciesbackfilloperability
  12. Workflow Schedulers intermediate Multiple choice

    Why is cron insufficient for a pipeline of interdependent data jobs?

    2 min answer orchestrationdependenciesbackfillidempotency