FREE MS-DS Master of Data science Cloud Data Platforms Questions and Answers

Question 1

Which characteristic is a primary advantage of using a serverless cloud data platform (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery) for data warehousing, particularly concerning operational overhead?

Accepted Answer

Elimination of infrastructure provisioning and management tasks.

Answer

Direct control over the underlying operating system and hardware.

Answer

Guaranteed predictable performance for all query types.

Answer

Lower egress costs for data transfer out of the cloud.

Question 2

A data analytics team is migrating its on-premise relational data warehouse to a cloud data platform. They require a solution that can handle petabytes of data, support complex SQL queries, scale storage and compute independently, and integrate seamlessly with various cloud-native services for ETL and BI. Which type of cloud data platform best fits these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Cloud-native data warehouse (e.g., BigQuery, Snowflake, Azure Synapse Analytics).

Answer

Object storage with a custom-built query engine.

Answer

Traditional SQL database hosted on a cloud VM.

Answer

NoSQL document database.

Question 3

Which of the following scenarios would most benefit from utilizing a 'data lake' architecture within a cloud data platform ecosystem?

Accepted Answer

Archiving diverse, multi-format raw data (structured, semi-structured, unstructured) for future analytical exploration and machine learning.

Answer

Storing highly structured transactional data for immediate OLTP operations.

Answer

Analyzing real-time sensor data streams for immediate anomaly detection.

Answer

Maintaining a small, normalized database for a specific application's backend.

Question 4

What is a key difference in how 'compute' is typically managed in a fully serverless cloud data warehouse (like Google BigQuery) compared to a traditional cloud-managed data warehouse (like a self-managed PostgreSQL on EC2)?

Accepted Answer

Serverless warehouses abstract compute entirely, billing based on query processing rather than provisioned instances.

Answer

Serverless warehouses require manual scaling of compute clusters by the user.

Answer

Traditional cloud-managed warehouses automatically scale compute resources based on query load.

Answer

Traditional cloud-managed warehouses provide per-query cost optimization based on data scanned.

Question 5

When designing a cloud data platform solution, which consideration is paramount for ensuring data governance and compliance with regulations like GDPR or HIPAA?

Accepted Answer

Implementing robust data encryption, access controls, and auditing capabilities.

Answer

Prioritizing the lowest possible storage costs.

Answer

Choosing a platform that only supports SQL for data manipulation.

Answer

Maximizing the number of data copies across different regions.

Question 6

A company is using a cloud data platform and needs to perform complex analytical queries on its data while also ensuring that frequently accessed data is retrieved with very low latency. Which architectural component or feature is most effective for optimizing query performance for frequently accessed datasets?

Accepted Answer

Utilizing caching mechanisms or materialized views.

Answer

Storing all data in an object storage bucket.

Answer

Implementing a robust data archiving strategy.

Answer

Performing batch processing exclusively.