Portfolio ↗

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. Transformation Frameworks beginner

    A team runs 40 SQL scripts nightly, numbered 01 through 40 and executed in order by a shell script. Someone proposes adopting a transformation framework. A senior analyst pushes back - the scripts already run in the right order, so what does a framework actually add? What is the honest answer, and when is the analyst right?

    3 min answer dbtdependency graphenvironmentstesting
  2. Transformation Frameworks advanced

    A transformation project has grown to 600 models with chains twelve deep. A change at the base has an unknowable blast radius. What do you do?

    2 min answer data-platformtransformationmodellingmaintainability
  3. Transformation Frameworks advanced

    A transformation project has grown to hundreds of models with a build taking hours. What structural problems produce that, and what fixes them?

    2 min answer dbt-labsdagincrementalmodularity
  4. Transformation Frameworks intermediate

    Review this transformation project. 300 models are all views with no materialisations and chains up to 11 deep. Every model has not-null and unique tests on every column - about 2400 tests. CI runs a full build plus the whole test suite on every pull request - 70 minutes. Each developer has a personal schema. What would you remove, what would you change and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer dbtviewsmaterialisationtesting
  5. Transformation Frameworks advanced

    Your transformation project has 2,400 models. A full build takes six hours and one change rebuilds half the graph. How did this happen and what do you do?

    2 min answer eltmodellingmaintainability
  6. Warehouse, Lake & Lakehouse beginner Multiple choice

    A 40-person company has 80 GB of analytical data growing about 4 GB a month, six analysts, a nightly load from Postgres and four SaaS sources, and no data engineer. An architect proposes an object-storage lakehouse with an open table format so the company never has to migrate again. What should they build first?

    2 min answer lakehousewarehousepragmatismsizing
  7. Warehouse, Lake & Lakehouse advanced

    A retail client needs BI dashboards for 400 concurrent users and a data science platform over the same data. One lakehouse or a lakehouse plus a serving layer?

    2 min answer lakehousearchitectureconcurrency
  8. Warehouse, Lake & Lakehouse advanced

    Datadog has published the design of Husky, its third-generation event store, which splits writers, readers and compactors into independently scaled services over a shared metadata store and commodity object storage rather than running one storage tier. What problem forces that separation, and where would copying it be a mistake?

    2 min answer datadoghuskycompactioncolumnar
  9. Warehouse, Lake & Lakehouse intermediate

    How should a platform decide between a warehouse, a lake and a lakehouse for a given workload?

    2 min answer warehouselakelakehouseworkload-fit
  10. Warehouse, Lake & Lakehouse advanced

    Leadership wants to consolidate a warehouse, a data lake and three departmental marts into a lakehouse. How do you scope and sequence this?

    2 min answer data-platformmigrationlakehousestrategy
  11. Warehouse, Lake & Lakehouse intermediate

    Notion runs its product on sharded Postgres and originally loaded analytics into a managed warehouse through off-the-shelf connectors. In 2022 it built its own data lake on change data capture into Kafka, Hudi tables and S3 instead. What forced that, and where would copying it be a mistake?

    2 min answer notionhudicdclakehouse
  12. Warehouse Migration advanced

    A retail company is migrating its warehouse to a new platform. What makes these migrations fail, and what sequence reduces the risk?

    2 min answer myntramigrationparityconsumers