Data Engineering Fundamentals 4

Question 1

What is data lineage?

Accepted Answer

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

Answer

Data lineage documents where data comes from and how it flows and changes across the pipeline.

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

Watermarks combined with event-time windows allow streaming systems to correctly handle records that arrive late.

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

A staging area is intermediate storage where raw data lands before being cleaned, transformed, and loaded.

Question 4

Which statement about a primary key is correct?

Accepted Answer

It uniquely identifies each row and cannot be NULL

Answer

A primary key uniquely identifies every row in a table and must be unique and non-null.

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

Horizontal scaling adds more nodes to share the workload, as opposed to upgrading a single machine (vertical scaling).

Data Engineering Practice Test