1. Digital Sovereignty advanced

    A public-sector customer will only accept a sovereign cloud region operated under local control. The team has treated it as a change of deployment target. What has the business actually bought and what is the bill?

    2 min answer sovereigntysovereign-cloudportabilitydivergence
  2. Digital Sovereignty advanced

    Review this claim. A public-sector tenant is served from an in-country region of a global cloud, staffed locally, with customer-managed keys in the provider's key service and a contract forbidding foreign access. The CI pipeline, the identity provider, the observability backend and the provider's operator tooling all run outside the jurisdiction. The team calls this sovereign. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?

    2 min answer digital-sovereigntyexternal-key-storecontrol-planekey-custody
  3. Digital Twin intermediate Multiple choice

    A building-controls platform stores a desired state per device and reconciles it on every connection. An operator sets a fan setpoint that one hardware revision cannot accept, and applies it in bulk to 40,000 units. The platform compares reported state with desired state to decide whether to act. What happens over the next day, and which single change stops it?

    2 min answer digital-twinreconciliationdesired-statewrite-amplification
  4. Digital Twin intermediate Multiple choice

    A field device is offline for hours at a time, and operators change its settings while it is away - sometimes twice. What should the platform store?

    2 min answer digital-twinshadowidempotencyreconciliation
  5. Digital Twin advanced

    A team proposes a digital-twin platform for 20,000 HVAC units: every sensor reading and every attribute change written to an event-sourced graph database with full per-attribute version history, a rules engine evaluating 400 conditions per device per minute, and a 3D visualisation of each site. The goal is "predictive maintenance and remote diagnostics". Review it. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer digital-twinover-engineeringreviewstate
  6. Digital Twin intermediate

    What problem does a digital twin actually solve, and when is it over-engineering?

    1 min answer digital-twinsimulationstatemodelling
  7. Dimensional Modelling intermediate Multiple choice

    A BI team replaces a 9-table star schema with a single denormalised table of 240 columns because dashboards were slow and analysts kept joining at the wrong grain. Six months later the table is 4 TB across roughly 3 billion rows, the nightly build takes 5 hours, and correcting one product's category requires a full rebuild. Which property did the flattening actually trade away?

    3 min answer one big tabledenormalisationscdrebuild cost
  8. Dimensional Modelling advanced

    An interviewer says — design the data model behind a subscription business's revenue reporting. Finance restates prior periods when a contract is amended and the board pack must be reproducible months later. Where do you take this?

    3 min answer bitemporalrestatementgrainfinance
  9. Dimensional Modelling beginner Multiple choice

    An order-lines fact table holds 40 million rows per day for three years across 18 columns and is partitioned by order date. In Parquet it averages roughly 36 bytes per row compressed and columns are of similar width. A dashboard query reads three columns over the last 90 days. Roughly how many bytes does it scan?

    2 min answer estimationcolumnarpartition-pruningstar-schema
  10. Dimensional Modelling intermediate

    When is dimensional modelling still the right approach, and what does it cost?

    2 min answer dimensional-modellingstar-schemausabilityperformance
  11. DR Testing intermediate

    A core internal service has run continuously for three years. What risk does that create?

    2 min answer awscold-startrecoverytesting
  12. DR Testing advanced

    An auditor requires evidence that a four-hour RTO is achievable for a system that has never failed over. Production cannot be risked and the business will not accept an unplanned outage. Sequence the first real disaster-recovery test.

    3 min answer dr testingrtorehearsalevidence