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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. 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
  2. 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
  3. Data Architecture advanced

    Discord stores trillions of messages. What is their partition key, and what problem does the second half of it solve?

    2 min answer case-studydiscordpartitioninghot-partition
  4. Data Architecture advanced

    Netflix personalises an entire home page in the time a TV takes to draw a screen. How, given that scoring every title for every member on request is impossible?

    2 min answer case-studynetflixprecomputationcqrs
  5. Data Architecture advanced Multiple choice

    Uber indexes the world with hexagons rather than squares for surge pricing and dispatch. Why does the shape matter, and what is the general lesson?

    2 min answer case-studyubergeospatialindexing
  6. 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
  7. Data Governance advanced

    In a large enterprise, multiple teams write directly to the same core business tables and change schemas independently. What problems emerge, and what governance changes fix them without stopping delivery?

    3 min answer governanceownershipschema-changecoupling
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. 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
  11. Data Lakes & Lakehouses advanced Multiple choice

    A recommendation platform stores petabytes of interaction events used for both ad-hoc analysis and model training, with occasional need to delete individual users' data. Which storage architecture fits, and why does the deletion requirement drive the choice?

    2 min answer lakehouseopen-table-formatsdeletiongdpr
  12. Data Lakes & Lakehouses advanced

    You are asked to choose between a cloud data warehouse and a lakehouse for a new analytics platform. How do you decide?

    2 min answer lakehousewarehouselock-indecision-making