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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. Cache Invalidation intermediate

    A product catalogue is cached with a 10-minute TTL. Merchandisers complain that price changes take 10 minutes to appear. What do you propose?

    2 min answer cachinginvalidationdesign
  2. Change Data Capture intermediate

    A logistics platform needs its operational database changes to reach a search index and an analytics warehouse. An engineer proposes writing to all three from the application. What is wrong, and what is the alternative?

    2 min answer portercdcdual-writeoutbox
  3. Change Data Capture intermediate

    A marketplace's search index lags several minutes behind catalogue updates and sellers complain their listings appear stale. Compare synchronous indexing, CDC pipelines and read-after-write patching at query time.

    2 min answer marketplacesearchcdcindexing
  4. CQRS intermediate Multiple choice

    A team proposes CQRS for a CRUD admin panel because reads are slow. Is that the right call?

    2 min answer cqrsover-engineeringread-model
  5. Data Architecture intermediate

    A dashboard query that took 200ms now takes 40 seconds. The table has grown to 200 million rows. Walk me through diagnosis and fix, including what you would not do.

    3 min answer indexingquery-performancedatabasesdiagnosis
  6. Data Architecture intermediate

    A product catalogue page does 40,000 reads per second against a database that can serve 5,000. Walk me through the caching design, including what happens at 3 AM when the cache is empty.

    2 min answer cachingperformancestampedeavailability
  7. Data Architecture intermediate Multiple choice

    A service writes to its database and then publishes an event to Kafka. Sometimes consumers see an event for a record that does not exist, and sometimes a record exists with no event. Why, and how do you fix it?

    2 min answer outboxconsistencyevent-drivenintegration
  8. Data Architecture intermediate

    A visual discovery platform serves enormous read volume over user-curated collections, with writes that are rare by comparison. A team proposes sharding the primary database immediately. What lower-complexity options should be evaluated first, and what evidence would justify sharding?

    2 min answer read-heavyshardingcachingreplicas
  9. Data Governance intermediate

    A dashboard has been wrong for three weeks. Nobody knows which upstream produced the table it reads. What is the governance failure, and what fixes it?

    2 min answer governancelineageownershipcontracts
  10. Data Governance intermediate

    Two teams compute "active user" differently and both numbers appear in board reporting. Which governance mechanisms address this, and which would not?

    2 min answer governancedefinitionscatalogueownership
  11. Data Lakes & Lakehouses intermediate Multiple choice

    A company is building a new analytics platform. Moderate data volume, heavy BI usage, strong governance requirements, a small data team. Warehouse or lakehouse?

    2 min answer lakehousewarehouseuberoperations
  12. Data Lakes & Lakehouses intermediate Multiple choice

    A data platform runs interactive analyst queries alongside multi-hour batch pipelines on shared compute. Interactive latency becomes unpredictable. What is the architectural fix?

    2 min answer databricksworkload-isolationlakehousecompute