Documentation & Best Practices Flashcards

Which artifact defines business terms in plain language, independent of any specific database implementation?

Answer: Business glossary

A business glossary captures agreed business definitions, while a data dictionary describes technical fields in specific systems.

A data steward discovers that 'Active Customer' is defined differently by Sales and Finance. What is the best-practice first step?

Answer: Escalate to the governance council to agree on an authoritative definition and record it in the glossary

Conflicting definitions should be resolved through governance and documented once as the authoritative standard.

In a governance documentation hierarchy, which document is the most specific and describes step-by-step how to perform a task?

Answer: Procedure

Procedures give detailed operational steps that implement standards, which in turn support policies.

What is the primary purpose of documenting data lineage?

Answer: To show the origin, movement, and transformations of data across systems

Lineage traces where data came from and how it changed, supporting impact analysis, trust, and audits.

Which of the following is an example of operational (process) metadata?

Answer: The timestamp and row count of last night's batch load

Operational metadata describes processing events such as load times, job status, and record counts.

A team keeps data documentation in personal email folders. What is the main risk this creates?

Answer: Knowledge loss and inconsistent, undiscoverable documentation

Decentralized, private documentation is hard to find, quickly becomes outdated, and disappears when people leave.

Under GDPR Article 30, what documentation must controllers generally maintain?

Answer: A Record of Processing Activities (RoPA)

Article 30 requires a record of processing activities describing purposes, categories of data, recipients, and retention.