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Quiz

126 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 areas126 Architecture Fundamentals2 Distributed Systems26 Data Architecture23 Cloud Architecture19 Networking3 API & Integration Architecture1 Reliability & Resilience4 Observability3 Performance & Capacity Engineering3 Security Architecture16 Cost Architecture & FinOps3 Business Architecture2 Architecture Communication2 Enterprise Architecture1 Legacy Modernization2 AI-Era Architecture3 Software Architecture & Engineering3 Architecture Patterns3 Architecture Decision-Making6 The Architect's Meta-Skills1
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

9 questions in Data Architecture.

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. ETL & ELT intermediate

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

    2 min answer idempotencypipelinesbackfillcorrectness
  7. Indexing intermediate

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

    2 min answer indexingwrite-performancereview
  8. 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
  9. Relational Modelling intermediate

    A team proposes storing the customer's address on every order row "so order history is accurate". Is that denormalisation or a modelling error?

    2 min answer normalisationmodellinghistorytemporal