Technology and Platform Selection Questions

Evaluation and justification of technologies services and platforms used to implement systems across the stack. Candidates should be able to select compute options including virtual machines containers and serverless platforms as well as orchestration and workflow engines messaging systems batch and streaming processing engines object and block storage data warehouses and other data platforms. The topic encompasses comparing managed services and self managed deployments cloud versus on premise hosting and choosing frameworks runtimes and overall stacks based on workload characteristics. Assessment focuses on weighing trade offs across cost operational overhead reliability latency and throughput scaling characteristics vendor lock in development velocity team familiarity and learning curve maturity and community support security and compliance and monitoring and debugging complexity. Candidates should demonstrate how system requirements map to service capabilities justify build versus buy decisions and managed service choices design proof of concept experiments and outline migration and rollout planning while making pragmatic choices that balance performance cost and operational risk.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Explain the benefits and drawbacks of data warehouses that separate storage and compute (e.g., Snowflake) versus monolithic architectures where storage and compute are tightly coupled (e.g., classic Redshift). Specifically discuss concurrency, elasticity, cost attribution, and data sharing for analytical workloads.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

When selecting a BI tool (Tableau, Power BI, Looker), what criteria do you prioritize as a Data Analyst? Discuss data connectivity, governance and access controls, self-service capabilities, learning curve, collaboration features, licensing, and integration with existing data platforms.

EasyBehavioral

0 practiced

Tell me about a time you evaluated and recommended a new analytics platform, BI tool, or data pipeline technology. Describe the process you followed to collect requirements, compare options, run evaluations or POCs, and how you persuaded stakeholders to adopt your recommendation. Use the STAR format.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

You have two managed warehouses: Provider A has lower storage costs but higher compute costs and tight BI integration; Provider B has higher storage cost but cheaper compute and more flexible data sharing features. Given workload mix of 70% interactive BI queries and 30% batch ELT, construct a decision framework and recommend which provider to choose. Show which metrics and thresholds you would use.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Compare columnar storage (e.g., Parquet/ORC or columnar DB) to row-oriented storage (e.g., Postgres row format) for analytics workloads. Give concrete examples of query patterns that benefit from columnar storage and patterns that are better on row-stores. As a Data Analyst, how would these differences affect your platform recommendation for ad-hoc analytics and dashboarding?

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