Quiz

2667 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 areas2667 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization92 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.

Quiz

A team proposes replacing PostgreSQL with a document store because "it scales better". Current load is 800 writes per second. What is your response?

A team wants to move a workload from PostgreSQL to a document store because "the schema keeps changing". What do you ask?

A collaboration product is sharding its database. Options are hash of message ID, hash of user ID, or workspace ID. Which and why?

A marketplace's product database has become the bottleneck for a read-heavy workload. The team proposes sharding immediately. What lower-complexity options should be exhausted first, and in what order?

A messaging platform stores messages partitioned by channel identifier. Some channels are enormously more active than others. Fix the partitioning.

A multi-tenant SaaS platform runs thousands of tenants on a shared relational database, but a handful of tenants now hold most of the data. Should it use shared tables, tenant partitioning, dedicated databases, sharding or a hybrid?

A workspace product stores every document as a tree of small "block" rows in one enormous table. Growth makes the table unmanageable. Design the sharding strategy - and identify the choice that is effectively irreversible.

Your geospatial data is partitioned by city. One city generates 40% of all traffic. What are your options?

A delivery platform migrated parts of its data estate to CockroachDB and other parts to Aurora. What evidence distinguishes workloads that justify a distributed SQL database from those better served by a single-writer managed Postgres?

A developer platform accumulates a relational database, an object store, a search index, a cache, a queue and a time-series store. When is this justified polyglot persistence, and when is it accidental sprawl?

A team wants to add a graph database for a "people you may know" feature. The system currently runs on one PostgreSQL instance. Evaluate.

A trading platform is considering a relational database, a key-value store, a time-series store and a search engine. What justifies each, and what is the cost of running four?