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Quiz

2741 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 areas2741 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering84 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 Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

2741 questions.

  1. Data Access Models advanced Multiple choice

    A file collaboration platform must decide how to model data access across personal files, shared folders, team spaces and external sharing. Which model fits?

    1 min answer authorisationrebacsharinggraph
  2. Data Access Models beginner Multiple choice

    A team masks national identity numbers inside each BI tool's data model so analysts see only the last four digits. Security asks them to move the masking into the warehouse instead. Why does the location of the rule matter more than the rule itself?

    2 min answer maskingaccess controlpolicy enforcementbi tools
  3. Data Access Models beginner

    An analyst can query the customer table. A regulator asks whether she was allowed to use it for the marketing model she built. Role-based access answers one of those questions and not the other. What is the difference between role-, attribute- and purpose-based access, and what does purpose add?

    2 min answer rbacabacpurpose-limitationaccess-control
  4. Data Access Models advanced

    Review this emergency data access design. A shared role called prod_break_glass grants read on every production table. Any team lead can approve a request in a chat channel. The grant has no expiry and is removed when someone remembers. Every use writes a row to an audit table in the same warehouse. It was used 140 times last year. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer access-controlbreak-glassauditexpiry
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. 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
  11. 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
  12. 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