Data Engineering Fundamentals 4

Question 1

What is data lineage?

Accepted Answer

The tracking of data's origin, movement, and transformations through systems

Answer

The encryption status of a dataset

Answer

The size of a dataset in bytes

Answer

The number of users who query a dataset

Question 2

Which approach best handles late-arriving data in a streaming pipeline?

Accepted Answer

Using watermarks and windowing to account for event-time delays

Answer

Ignoring all delayed records

Answer

Restarting the pipeline daily

Answer

Switching to batch only

Question 3

What is the purpose of a staging area in a data warehouse load process?

Accepted Answer

To temporarily hold raw extracted data before transformation and loading

Answer

To serve final reports to users

Answer

To store user credentials

Answer

To archive deleted records permanently

Question 4

Which statement about a primary key is correct?

Accepted Answer

It uniquely identifies each row and cannot be NULL

Answer

It can contain NULL values

Answer

It must reference another table

Answer

There can be many primary keys per table

Question 5

What does horizontal scaling (scaling out) mean for a data system?

Accepted Answer

Adding more machines or nodes to distribute the load

Answer

Adding more CPU and RAM to a single machine

Answer

Reducing the dataset size

Answer

Upgrading to faster disks only

Question 6

Why are data quality checks important in a pipeline?

Accepted Answer

They detect issues like nulls, duplicates, and schema drift before bad data spreads downstream

Answer

They increase storage costs intentionally

Answer

They replace the need for transformations

Answer

They speed up network transfer

Question 7

What is denormalization typically used for in analytical data models?

Accepted Answer

Improving read/query performance by reducing the number of joins

Answer

Enforcing strict transactional integrity

Answer

Minimizing all storage usage

Answer

Preventing any data duplication