CDP Cheat Sheet 2026

The 30 highest-yield CDP facts, distilled from real exam questions. Print it, save it as a PDF, or study it here — free, no sign-up.

1. Which CAP theorem property is sacrificed by Apache Cassandra by default in favor of availability and partition tolerance? → Consistency
2. Which configuration property sets the default HDFS block size for newly written files? → dfs.blocksize
3. Which command would you use to check the health and block distribution of a specific HDFS path? → hdfs fsck /path -files -blocks -locations
4. Which concept describes the practice of moving compute to where data resides rather than moving data to compute in big data systems? → Data locality
5. Which approach is most effective for sustaining long-term data quality improvements? → Embedding data quality rules into data entry and integration processes to prevent defects
6. Which financial data standard defines a common language for electronic communication of business and financial data? → XBRL
7. What does ETL stand for in the context of data integration? → Extract, Transform, Load
8. Which regulatory framework requires financial institutions to report derivative positions to a trade repository? → Dodd-Frank Act (CFTC reporting)
9. What is a key advantage of ELT over traditional ETL in a cloud data warehouse environment? → ELT leverages the target system's massively parallel processing power for transformations
10. Which file format is optimized for columnar storage and is widely used in big data ecosystems for analytical queries? → Parquet
11. The difference between a collection of data's top and lowest scores. Answer: Range → TRUE
12. What does 'right to erasure' (also called 'right to be forgotten') under GDPR mean? → Individuals can request that their personal data be deleted under certain conditions
13. What role does metadata play in supporting data integration processes? → It describes the structure, origin, lineage, and transformation history of integrated data
14. What is 'data provenance'? → The documented history of data's origin and transformations over its lifecycle
15. What does 'grain' mean in the context of a data warehouse fact table? → The level of detail that each row in the fact table represents
16. What is the purpose of HDFS Federation? → Allowing multiple NameNodes to manage separate namespace volumes on the same cluster
17. In portfolio analytics, what does 'alpha' represent? → Excess return of an investment relative to a benchmark index
18. In Hadoop MapReduce, what happens during the 'shuffle and sort' phase? → Mapper output is transferred to reducers and sorted by key before reduction
19. In the context of streaming analytics, what is 'watermarking' used for? → Handling late-arriving data by defining a threshold for event-time delays
20. Which consensus algorithm is commonly used by distributed systems like ZooKeeper to achieve leader election and coordination? → Paxos
21. Which type of data governance maturity model stage describes ad hoc, undocumented data management with no formal policies? → Initial/Reactive
22. Which normal form requires that every non-key attribute be fully dependent on the entire primary key? → Second Normal Form (2NF)
23. In which of the following diagrams is correlation shown? → Corrgram
24. What does 'data lineage' mean in the context of data governance? → Documenting the origin, movement, and transformation of data over time
25. What is a Data Governance Council primarily responsible for? → Overseeing enterprise data governance policies and resolving data conflicts
26. In YARN, what is the role of the ApplicationMaster? → Negotiating resources and tracking task status for a specific application
27. What is the primary role of a message broker in a data integration architecture? → Routing messages between producers and consumers while decoupling them
28. Which data quality dimension refers to data being available when needed for decision-making? → Timeliness
29. Which Hadoop tool is used to balance block distribution across DataNodes? → hdfs balancer
30. Which HDFS configuration parameter controls the minimum percentage of DataNodes that must successfully write a block before the client receives acknowledgment? → dfs.replication.min