Data Engineering Interview
Questions and Answers
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Interviewer:
Your company uses Azure services to integrate data from
multiple sources and create analytical dashboards.
Suppose you need to ingest and process 2 TB of data daily
from three different sources: SQL Server, an SFTP server,
and REST APIs. How would you design the data pipeline?
I would use Azure Data Factory (ADF) as the primary
tool to orchestrate the pipeline:
Use Copy Activity in ADF to ingest data from SQL
Server, SFTP, and REST APIs.
Set up a self-hosted integration runtime for on-
premises SQL Server connectivity.
Land the ingested data in Azure Data Lake
Storage Gen2 for staging.
Use Mapping Data Flows or Azure Databricks for
data transformation, including cleansing,
deduplication, and enrichment.
Load the transformed data into Azure Synapse
Analytics for analytical querying and reporting
Interviewer:
How would you optimize this pipeline to handle
potential bottlenecks, such as high latency or
failures during data ingestion?
Candidate:
Parallelism: Increase the degree of parallelism in
ADF Copy Activities to ingest data faster.
Retries and Monitoring: Enable retry policies in
ADF and integrate with Azure Monitor and Log
Analytics for real-time failure tracking and
resolution.
Partitioning: For SQL and large datasets, use
source-side partitioning to split data into smaller
chunks for parallel processing.
Integration Runtimes: Ensure the self-hosted
runtime is scaled to match ingestion workloads.
Throughput Optimization: Optimize Data Lake
and Synapse settings, such as file sizes and
caching, to reduce downstream processing
latency.
Interviewer:
How would you secure the pipeline and ensure
compliance with standards like GDPR?
Candidate:
Data Encryption: Enable encryption at rest in
Data Lake and Synapse using Azure-managed
keys or customer-managed keys (CMK).
Access Control: Use Azure RBAC to ensure only
authorized users can access data and pipeline
configurations.
Data Masking: Apply dynamic data masking or
pseudonymization to sensitive fields, such as
personally identifiable information (PII).
Private Endpoints: Use Azure Private Link to
ensure data does not traverse the public
internet.
Auditing and Monitoring: Implement activity
logs and Azure Policy to enforce compliance
standards across services.
Interviewer:
Suppose the analytics team complains about slow query
performance in Synapse. How would you investigate and
resolve this?
Query Analysis: Use the Query Performance
Insight in Synapse to identify long-running
queries and their execution plans.
Indexing: Ensure proper indexing and
statistics updates on frequently queried
columns.
Distribution Strategy: Evaluate the table
distribution (hash, round-robin, or replicated)
and adjust for better parallelism.
Materialized Views: Create materialized views
for pre-aggregated datasets.
Caching: Use Result Set Caching to reduce
query response times for repeated queries.
Interviewer:
If the pipeline needs to process real-time data in addition
to batch data, how would you extend the design?
I would incorporate Azure Stream Analytics or
Azure Databricks Structured Streaming:
Use Azure Event Hubs or IoT Hub to ingest
real-time data.
Process the data using Stream Analytics
queries or Databricks Structured Streaming,
applying filters, aggregations, and joins as
needed.
Write the processed real-time data into Delta
Lake for a unified view with batch data.
Integrate Power BI for real-time dashboarding
using DirectQuery or streaming datasets.
This hybrid design ensures we can handle both
real-time and batch processing seamlessly.
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