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Data Quality and Governance Questions

Covers the principles, frameworks, practices, and tooling used to ensure data is accurate, complete, timely, and trustworthy across systems and pipelines. Key areas include data quality checks and monitoring: nullness and type checks, freshness and timeliness validation, referential integrity, deduplication, outlier detection, reconciliation, and automated alerting. Includes designing service level agreements for data freshness and accuracy, data lineage and impact analysis, metadata and catalog management, data classification, access controls, and compliance policies. Encompasses operational reliability of data systems: failure handling, recovery time objectives, backup and disaster recovery strategies, data observability, and incident response for data anomalies. Candidates may be evaluated on designing end to end data quality programs, selecting metrics and tooling, defining roles and stewardship (data owner, steward, custodian), building golden-record and master-data-management strategies for record linkage and deduplication across source systems (illustrative domains include CRM and sales data, IoT telemetry, financial transactions, and event or log data, among others), and implementing automated pipelines and governance controls.

EasyTechnical
51 practiced
Explain the purpose of a data catalog or metadata management system for BI. For a sales_transactions dataset list required metadata fields (technical and business), recommended tags, and how you would surface this metadata inside self-service tools like Tableau or Looker.
MediumTechnical
45 practiced
Given transactions(transaction_id, customer_id, event_date, amount) write SQL that identifies customers whose current monthly revenue is greater than 3 standard deviations from their rolling 6-month mean. Use window functions and show sample output columns: customer_id, month, rolling_mean, rolling_stddev, amount, z_score.
HardTechnical
73 practiced
A customer requests deletion under GDPR. Describe the end-to-end process to ensure deletion propagates to analytics aggregates, feature stores used by ML, backups and archived reports, and downstream third-party processors. Include verification steps and trade-offs between complete erasure and pseudonymization where needed.
MediumTechnical
37 practiced
Design a metadata tagging schema to support discovery, sensitivity labeling, lifecycle, ownership, and SLA for datasets in the analytics catalog. Provide example tags for a dataset named sales_transactions, and describe how to enforce tag consistency across teams.
EasyTechnical
49 practiced
Given a users table users(user_id bigint, email text, name text, created_at timestamp) containing duplicate emails, write PostgreSQL SQL to produce a mapping of duplicate_user_id -> canonical_user_id where canonical is the row with the latest created_at. Explain assumptions and how you would use this mapping in a controlled merge.

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