Data Management & Integration Flashcards

After acquiring a competitor, a CDO must integrate two customer databases with conflicting definitions of 'active customer.' What should happen first?

Answer: Establish an agreed business glossary definition through data governance

Semantic conflicts need a governed business definition before any technical integration can produce trusted results.

Which API style lets a client request exactly the fields it needs from multiple related resources in a single query?

Answer: GraphQL

GraphQL lets clients specify the response shape, which avoids over-fetching and multiple round trips.

A 'data contract' between a producing domain and consuming teams typically specifies what?

Answer: Schema, semantics, quality expectations, and SLAs for a data product

Data contracts formalize schema, meaning, quality, and freshness commitments, so upstream changes don't break consumers.

In a medallion architecture, what does the 'silver' layer typically contain?

Answer: Cleansed, conformed, and deduplicated data

Bronze holds raw data, silver holds cleaned and conformed data, and gold holds business-ready aggregates.

Which metric best shows the business value of a data integration program to the executive board?

Answer: Reduction in time-to-insight and cost of manual reconciliation

Executives value outcome metrics like faster decisions and lower operating cost, not activity counts.

What is the main risk of schema-on-read approaches when governance is weak?

Answer: Inconsistent interpretations of the same data by different consumers

Without governed definitions, each consumer may apply a different schema and get conflicting results.

Which practice best ensures integration pipelines fail safely when upstream data breaks expectations?

Answer: Automated data quality checks with quarantine and alerting in the pipeline

Inline validation with quarantine stops bad data from spreading and alerts owners right away.