Cloud Data Warehouse Architecture Questions
Understand modern cloud data platforms: Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Azure Synapse. Know their architecture, scalability models, performance characteristics, and cost optimization strategies. Discuss separation of compute and storage, time travel, and zero-copy cloning.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Estimate monthly cost for a proposed analytics workload: 50 TB stored, 3 TB daily ingest, and an expected 200 TB scanned per month in queries. Choose one provider (Snowflake/BigQuery/Redshift) and list assumptions, cost components, and how you might reduce costs.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Given a heavy read workload from BI tools that join wide fact tables and small dimension tables, explain how you'd design table schemas and physical layout to minimize query latency and scanned data, including normalization/denormalization trade-offs.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Write a partition-pruning friendly SQL query (in Snowflake or BigQuery) to compute daily active users (DAU) for the past 7 days from a partitioned events table events(ds DATE, user_id STRING, event_type STRING). Explain how your query minimizes scanned data.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Design workload isolation for multiple teams sharing a cloud warehouse: define namespaces, resource monitors, virtual warehouses/WLM queues, quotas, and billing lines. Explain how you'd implement enforcement and automated notifications when teams approach their quotas.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Explain the internal storage/execution differences between Snowflake micro-partitions, Parquet/ORC columnar files, and Dremel's execution model (BigQuery). As a data engineer, say how these affect predicate pruning, columnar reads, and per-query bytes scanned.
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