Information Architecture & Strategy Flashcards

Which data warehouse modeling approach separates business keys, relationships, and descriptive attributes into hubs, links, and satellites to support auditability and agile change?

Answer: Data Vault 2.0

Data Vault uses hubs for business keys, links for relationships, and satellites for history-tracked attributes.

Inmon's approach to the data warehouse is best described as which of the following?

Answer: Top-down, with a normalized enterprise warehouse feeding dependent data marts

Inmon advocates a normalized, integrated corporate information factory that feeds downstream marts.

In a lakehouse medallion architecture, which layer typically holds cleansed, conformed, and deduplicated data?

Answer: Silver

Silver holds validated, conformed data, while bronze is raw and gold is business-level aggregates.

An MDM implementation keeps golden records in a central hub but leaves source systems as the systems of entry and syncs nothing back to them. Which style is this?

Answer: Consolidation

Consolidation builds golden records in a hub for downstream use without writing them back to sources.

What is the main purpose of a semantic layer in an enterprise information architecture?

Answer: To give consistent, business-friendly definitions of metrics and entities across BI and AI tools

A semantic layer standardizes metric logic and business terms, so different tools produce the same answers.

A formal agreement between a data producer and its consumers that specifies schema, quality expectations, SLAs, and change management is called what?

Answer: A data contract

Data contracts make producer-consumer expectations explicit and enforceable, which reduces breaking changes downstream.

Under the CAP theorem, what must a distributed data store choose between during a network partition?

Answer: Consistency and availability

When a partition occurs, a distributed system can guarantee either consistency or availability, but not both.