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2948 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 areas2948 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking96 API & Integration Architecture87 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering100 Security Architecture105 Cost Architecture & FinOps102 Business Architecture103 Architecture Communication102 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization102 AI-Era Architecture106 Software Architecture & Engineering93 Architecture Patterns94 Architecture Decision-Making101 The Architect's Meta-Skills102 Delivery & Release Engineering103 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience102 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

6 questions in File Formats & Compaction.

  1. File Formats & Compaction advanced

    A lakehouse table takes 400 GB a day from a streaming job that commits every 60 seconds across 24 partitions. Daily compaction rewrites yesterday's data and a weekly job re-sorts the last 30 days. Roughly how much compute does that maintenance need, what share of the bill is it, and which assumption dominates the error?

    3 min answer compactionmaintenanceplanning-numberscost
  2. File Formats & Compaction intermediate

    A lakehouse team raises its compaction target file size from 128 MB to 1 GB and switches the write codec from Snappy to Zstandard. Query cost falls. What did they give up, and when does that bill arrive?

    2 min answer datadogcompactionparquetzstd
  3. File Formats & Compaction intermediate

    A platform's analytical queries slow steadily over months with no change in data volume per day. What is happening?

    2 min answer small-filescompactionformatsmetadata
  4. File Formats & Compaction intermediate

    A table written by a streaming job has become unusably slow. It holds 400 GB across 8 million files. Diagnose and fix.

    2 min answer performancecompactionstreaming
  5. File Formats & Compaction beginner Multiple choice

    A team keeps three years of event data as gzipped CSV in object storage because it is simple and anything can read it. The table is now about 500 GB compressed and the daily dashboard query reads four of the 60 columns. What has the simplicity actually cost them?

    2 min answer csvparquetgzipsplittability
  6. File Formats & Compaction advanced

    Review this configuration. A 60 TB events table is partitioned by ingest_date and written by a streaming job that commits every 60 seconds. A compaction job runs hourly over the last 24 hours with a 512 MB target and sorts each file by event_timestamp. Snapshot expiry runs monthly with 90-day retention. 85% of queries filter on customer_id over a 7-day range. What would you remove, what would you change and what would you leave alone?

    3 min answer compactionsort keysnapshot expirystatistics