Architecture & System Design Flashcards
7 cards from real CDT practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Architecture & System Design flashcards as text
A document platform needs to support both structured (forms data) and unstructured (free-text) content in one repository. Which database approach handles this best?
Answer: Hybrid architecture combining relational and document-oriented stores
A hybrid architecture uses a relational store for structured metadata and a document-oriented store (e.g., MongoDB, Elasticsearch) for flexible unstructured content.
When implementing full-text search across millions of documents, which indexing approach provides the fastest query response times?
Answer: Inverted index with term frequency weighting
An inverted index maps each term to the list of documents containing it, enabling sub-second keyword lookups across massive corpora.
Which design principle ensures that a document management system can integrate with future applications that do not yet exist?
Answer: Open, versioned API contracts with backward compatibility guarantees
Open, versioned APIs with backward compatibility allow unknown future consumers to integrate without requiring changes to existing integrations.
In document lifecycle management, what triggers the 'disposition' phase?
Answer: The document's retention period expires and its hold status is clear
Disposition is triggered automatically when the retention schedule expires and no legal holds are active, initiating destruction, transfer, or permanent archival.
What is the purpose of a 'federation' layer in a large enterprise document architecture spanning multiple departmental systems?
Answer: To provide a unified search and access interface across disparate content repositories
A federation layer presents a single virtual repository to users while documents physically reside in different underlying systems, enabling unified discovery without migration.
Which scalability pattern is most appropriate for a document conversion service that experiences irregular spikes in demand?
Answer: Event-driven auto-scaling triggered by queue depth
Event-driven auto-scaling monitors queue depth and provisions additional conversion workers during spikes, then scales down during idle periods to minimize cost.
A regulatory requirement mandates that the audit trail for sensitive documents must be stored separately from the documents themselves. What is the primary reason for this design choice?
Answer: Separating audit trails prevents tampering with logs even if the document store is compromised
Storing audit logs in an independent, write-protected system ensures that an attacker or insider who modifies documents cannot also alter the evidence of those changes.