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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

90 questions in Data Architecture.

  1. 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
  2. Change Data Capture advanced

    A mobility platform wants operational database changes available to analytics and search within seconds, without adding load to the transactional databases. Design the change-data-capture pipeline and identify its principal failure modes.

    3 min answer cdclog-basedreplicationstreaming
  3. Change Data Capture advanced

    A team plans to publish database row changes via CDC as the organisation's domain events. What is wrong with that and what would you propose?

    3 min answer cdcoutboxdomain-eventscoupling
  4. CQRS advanced

    A consumer fintech team proposes CQRS because their read and write workloads are very different. What evidence should be required before accepting the added synchronisation, projection and operational complexity?

    2 min answer credcqrsprojectionscomplexity
  5. CQRS advanced

    A marketplace team proposes CQRS because search and browse read patterns differ sharply from the transactional write model. What evidence should be required before accepting the extra synchronisation and projection complexity?

    3 min answer cqrsread-modelsprojectionsetsy
  6. CQRS advanced

    A search index built by a projection has been serving wrong results for three weeks because of a bug in the projection logic. Walk through recovery.

    2 min answer cqrsprojectionsrebuildlinkedin
  7. 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
  8. Data Architecture advanced

    A B2B commerce platform aggregates inventory from many suppliers whose feeds arrive asynchronously with different frequencies and reliability. How should stale inventory, safety stock, reconciliation and supplier failures be handled?

    2 min answer udaanb2bsupplier-feedsstaleness
  9. 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
  10. Data Architecture advanced

    A feed-ranking system needs embeddings, counters and aggregates pushed from offline jobs to an online store at very high write throughput. How should such a derived-data serving system handle full rebuilds, incremental updates, versioning and reads during a swap?

    2 min answer linkedinvenicederived-datafeature-store
  11. Data Architecture advanced

    A multi-tenant SaaS product has outgrown one database. You must shard. How do you choose the partition key, and what makes this decision so expensive to get wrong?

    2 min answer shardingpartitioningmulti-tenancyscaling
  12. 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