System Architecture & Design Flashcards

A disaster recovery plan states that no more than 15 minutes of data may be lost after an outage. Which metric does this define?

Answer: Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

RPO is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time, while RTO is the maximum acceptable downtime.

Which technique captures inserts, updates, and deletes from a source database's transaction log so they can be streamed to downstream systems with low latency?

Answer: Change Data Capture (CDC)

Log-based CDC reads database changes as they happen without heavy queries against source tables.

Splitting one large database horizontally across several servers by a key such as customer ID is called what?

Answer: Sharding

Sharding spreads rows across independent nodes by a shard key to scale writes and storage horizontally.

Within TOGAF's Architecture Development Method, which phase defines the target data and application architectures?

Answer: Phase C: Information Systems Architectures

TOGAF ADM Phase C covers the Information Systems Architectures, which include data architecture and application architecture.

What is the main purpose of an Architecture Decision Record (ADR)?

Answer: To record the context, decision, and consequences of a significant architecture choice

ADRs record why architecture decisions were made so future teams understand the trade-offs.

An auditor asks the CDO to show which source systems and transformations feed a regulatory report figure. Which architecture capability answers this most directly?

Answer: Data lineage

Data lineage traces data from origin through transformations to consumption, which supports audits and impact analysis.

Which statement best describes eventual consistency in a replicated data store?

Answer: Replicas may briefly diverge but converge to the same state if no new updates occur

Eventual consistency trades immediate agreement for availability and latency, and replicas converge over time.