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2868 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 areas2868 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture87 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication102 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering93 Architecture Patterns94 Architecture Decision-Making101 The Architect's Meta-Skills102 Delivery & Release Engineering103 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data103 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture101 Edge, Mobile & IoT98 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture99 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

91 questions in Data Governance & Semantics.

  1. Reference Data beginner

    An order total is stored as the integer 1000 alongside a currency code. In USD that is ten dollars. The same integer means one thousand yen in JPY and one dinar in KWD. A report sums the column across currencies and the total looks plausible. Why is this a reference-data problem rather than a bug in the report?

    3 min answer reference datacurrencyminor unitsiso 4217
  2. Reference Data intermediate

    Tax rates change annually and must apply from a specific date. How do you manage that across a dozen systems?

    2 min answer reference-dataversioningeffective-datesdistribution
  3. Reference Data advanced

    Twilio's public Messages API documents a fixed set of message status values, and the initial value depends on how the message was created - accepted when a Messaging Service is used, queued when it is not. Every customer who writes an exhaustive match over that list inherits a dependency on it. What does publishing a code list as part of an API force on its owner, and where would copying that approach be a mistake?

    3 min answer twilioreference-datacode-listsapi-contracts
  4. Retention & Purge advanced

    A community platform implements a retention policy deleting user content after a defined period. What happens that nobody planned for?

    1 min answer retentiondeletionreferential-integritybackups
  5. Retention & Purge intermediate

    A subject erasure request arrives for one customer. Their rows sit in a lakehouse table of 4 billion rows in 1,100 partitions, with 30 days of snapshot retention, plus a search index and two downstream marts. Roughly what does honouring it cost, and which assumption dominates?

    3 min answer gdprerasureimmutabilitysnapshots
  6. Retention & Purge advanced

    An erasure request arrives for a customer whose data has propagated into a warehouse, a lake, search indexes, caches, backups and trained models. How is this handled, and what should have been designed in advance?

    2 min answer gdprerasurederived-datacrypto-shredding
  7. Retention & Purge advanced

    An insurance platform must delete data on request while retaining records for regulatory periods. What design satisfies both?

    2 min answer ackoretentionerasurelegal-hold
  8. Retention & Purge advanced Multiple choice

    On 5 April 2022 Atlassian ran a maintenance script to deactivate a legacy app. The script carried both a mark-for-deletion mode used in daily operations and a permanent-delete mode kept for compliance erasure. It ran in the wrong mode against site identifiers rather than app identifiers and destroyed 883 sites belonging to about 775 customers. Restoring them took up to two weeks. Which design change most directly prevents a repeat?

    2 min answer atlassianerasureblast radiussoft delete
  9. Retention & Purge advanced

    Your platform is built on an append-only event log with a lakehouse behind it. Legal asks how you will satisfy erasure requests within 30 days. What is your answer?

    2 min answer privacyerasurearchitecturecompliance
  10. Row & Column-Level Security advanced

    A data platform must enforce that analysts see only permitted rows and columns across thousands of tables and hundreds of users. How should this be designed so it is enforceable and auditable?

    2 min answer access-controlabacmaskinggovernance
  11. Row & Column-Level Security advanced

    A financial platform must restrict which rows and columns each analyst can see. Where should that be enforced?

    2 min answer razorpayrlsaccess-controlenforcement
  12. Row & Column-Level Security advanced

    Design field-level and record-level access controls for a business application where each customer configures their own rules.

    1 min answer rlscolumn-securitypolicymulti-tenancy