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2777 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 areas2777 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture87 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering93 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making91 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering93 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture99 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

98 questions in Data Platform Architecture.

  1. File Formats & Compaction intermediate

    A platform's analytical queries slow steadily over months with no change in data volume per day. What is happening?

    2 min answer small-filescompactionformatsmetadata
  2. File Formats & Compaction intermediate

    A table written by a streaming job has become unusably slow. It holds 400 GB across 8 million files. Diagnose and fix.

    2 min answer performancecompactionstreaming
  3. File Formats & Compaction beginner Multiple choice

    A team keeps three years of event data as gzipped CSV in object storage because it is simple and anything can read it. The table is now about 500 GB compressed and the daily dashboard query reads four of the 60 columns. What has the simplicity actually cost them?

    2 min answer csvparquetgzipsplittability
  4. File Formats & Compaction advanced

    Review this configuration. A 60 TB events table is partitioned by ingest_date and written by a streaming job that commits every 60 seconds. A compaction job runs hourly over the last 24 hours with a 512 MB target and sorts each file by event_timestamp. Snapshot expiry runs monthly with 90-day retention. 85% of queries filter on customer_id over a 7-day range. What would you remove, what would you change and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer compactionsort keysnapshot expirystatistics
  5. Ingestion Patterns advanced Multiple choice

    A connector extracts a SaaS object by paging with offset and a limit of 500 under a modified-at filter. Every nightly run loads exactly 10000 rows and finishes green. Reconciliation shows 61000 matching records at source. The API returns HTTP 200 with an empty page at offset 10000 and support confirms an undocumented deep-paging cap. Which change actually closes the gap?

    3 min answer connectorspaginationsilent-failurewatermarks
  6. Ingestion Patterns advanced

    A data-ingestion platform runs hundreds of connectors, each with different APIs, rate limits, failure modes and schemas. How should isolation, retries, scheduling, checkpointing, backfills and schema evolution be designed?

    2 min answer airbytefivetranconnectorsisolation
  7. Ingestion Patterns advanced

    A platform ingests high-volume telemetry from many sources. Which ingestion pattern properties matter most?

    2 min answer ingestionbackpressureidempotencyschema
  8. Ingestion Patterns intermediate

    A platform team proposes one ingestion standard: every source publishes to Kafka and the warehouse loads only from Kafka. That includes 40 SaaS connectors that pull once a day. The argument is one path, one set of tools, and replayability everywhere. Review it — what would you remove, what would you keep and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer ingestionkafkauniformityoperability
  9. Ingestion Patterns intermediate

    An analytics team extracts daily using a `modified_at` watermark. Reconciliation shows the warehouse has 3% more customers than the source. Why?

    2 min answer cdcingestiondata-quality
  10. Medallion Architecture intermediate

    A data platform organises tables into bronze, silver and gold layers. What determines what belongs in each, and what is the common failure?

    2 min answer databricksmedallionlayerscontracts
  11. Medallion Architecture beginner Multiple choice

    A platform lands raw order events in bronze, types and cleans them in silver, and builds a revenue table in gold. Finance finds that orders in three currencies have been converted at the wrong rate since July - the conversion is a CASE expression in the silver transformation. Which correction is the layering there to make possible?

    2 min answer medallionreprocessingbronzeidempotency
  12. Medallion Architecture intermediate

    A team adopts bronze/silver/gold layering and every layer becomes a copy of the previous one with minor changes. What should each layer actually guarantee?

    2 min answer medallionlayeringdata-qualitycontracts