ETL Testing ETL Performance and Scalability Testing 2

Question 1

What is 'ETL stress testing'?

Accepted Answer

Pushing the ETL pipeline beyond its normal capacity limits to observe how it behaves and fails under extreme conditions

Answer

Stress testing deliberately overloads the ETL pipeline to identify its breaking point, failure modes, and recovery behavior when operating beyond designed capacity.

Question 2

Which database technique can dramatically improve ETL load performance by dividing large tables into smaller physical segments?

Accepted Answer

Table partitioning

Answer

Table partitioning divides large tables into smaller, manageable segments by a partition key (e.g., date), allowing the ETL to load and query only relevant partitions for better performance.

Question 3

In ETL performance testing, what is a 'baseline measurement'?

Accepted Answer

An initial performance benchmark recorded under normal conditions, used as a reference point for future comparison

Answer

A baseline measurement captures current ETL performance metrics (duration, throughput, resource usage) so future runs can be compared to detect regression or improvement.

Question 4

What ETL bottleneck does 'partition pruning' help address in performance testing?

Accepted Answer

Full table scans on partitioned tables by eliminating irrelevant partitions from query execution

Answer

Partition pruning allows the query engine to skip partitions that don't match filter criteria, dramatically reducing I/O by reading only the relevant data segments.

Question 5

Which ETL performance test validates that parallel job streams do not cause database contention or deadlocks?

Accepted Answer

Concurrency / multi-user load test

Answer

Concurrency testing runs multiple ETL streams simultaneously to verify that parallel execution does not cause locking, deadlocks, or data corruption in the target database.

ETL Testing - extract, transform, load Practice Test

ETL Testing - extract, transform, load Practice Test

ETL Testing ETL Performance and Scalability Testing 2