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Quiz

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. Reverse ETL intermediate

    Marketing wants warehouse segments pushed into the campaign tool hourly. What do you require before agreeing?

    2 min answer integrationgovernanceoperations
  2. Slowly Changing Dimensions intermediate

    A "customers by segment" dashboard tile reports 104,300 where the customer table holds 100,000 rows. Revenue on the same dashboard is also about 4% high. The join looks correct, the pipeline is green, and re-running changes nothing. What is happening?

    3 min answer scd2joinsfan-outdbt tests
  3. Slowly Changing Dimensions advanced

    A customer dimension has always been Type 1 - attributes overwritten in place. Compliance now requires every order to report the segment and region the customer had at the time of the order, three years back. 140 reports read the dimension and 2.1 billion fact rows join it on the natural customer key. Sequence the conversion under live reporting.

    3 min answer scdtype-2migrationsurrogate-keys
  4. Slowly Changing Dimensions intermediate

    A customer's attribute changes. Which slowly-changing-dimension approach should be used, and what decides it?

    2 min answer scdhistorypoint-in-timereporting
  5. Slowly Changing Dimensions intermediate

    A retail platform's product attributes change over time, and historical reports must reflect the values as they were. What modelling approach handles this?

    2 min answer nykaascdhistorydimensional
  6. Slowly Changing Dimensions intermediate Multiple choice

    The business asks why the regional sales report changed for a period that closed six months ago. What happened, and what is the fix?

    2 min answer dimensional-modellinghistorycorrectness
  7. Storage Layout & Partitioning intermediate Multiple choice

    A 4 TB events table serves three query patterns: 80% ask for one tenant over the last 7 days, 15% look up a single event by id, and 5% scan one product across all history. The table currently has no partitioning. Which layout should the team adopt?

    2 min answer partitioningclusteringcardinalitylayout
  8. Storage Layout & Partitioning intermediate

    A 6 TB events table is partitioned by `customer_id`. Queries are slow and the storage layer complains. What is wrong?

    2 min answer partitioningperformancedesign
  9. Storage Layout & Partitioning beginner Multiple choice

    A new engineer asks why the 8 TB events table in the lakehouse has no index on customer_id when the same column is indexed in the operational Postgres the data came from. What is the actual reason?

    2 min answer partitioningcolumnarpruningparquet
  10. Storage Layout & Partitioning advanced

    A platform's analytical queries scan far more data than they need. Which storage layout decisions fix this?

    2 min answer partitioningclusteringpruninglayout
  11. Storage Layout & Partitioning advanced

    An analytical query scans far more data than it needs. Before adding compute, what layout decisions should be examined?

    2 min answer meeshopartitioningclusteringfile-size
  12. Transformation Frameworks intermediate

    A platform adopts a transformation framework and analysts build hundreds of models. What governance is needed to prevent a tangle?

    2 min answer transformationmodellinggovernancetesting