50 IBM Cloud Pak for Data V3.x Data Engineer Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

A data engineering team is onboarding new users to IBM Cloud Pak for Data and wants to ensure users can only see services and data assets allowed by corporate policy. Which capability primarily provides this control?

A data engineer needs to ingest daily CSV files from object storage, apply a few transformations, and load curated tables into a data warehouse. The team prefers a graphical tool with scheduling and operationalization features. Which service is the best fit?

A project team wants business users to be able to find trusted datasets and understand their meaning, owner, and classification (for example, 'PII'). Which feature best supports this requirement?

A team wants to run SQL queries across multiple data sources without copying the data into a new repository, and they need a single logical view for analysts. Which approach should they use?

A DataStage job that reads from a relational source becomes slower as data volume grows. The job currently uses a single sequential read. What is the recommended way to improve throughput in a scalable manner?

A company must ensure that customer identifiers are masked for most users, while a small compliance group can access the raw values. Which governance approach best satisfies this requirement in Cloud Pak for Data?

A pipeline loads curated tables nightly. Business users report that some rows contain invalid postal codes. The data engineer wants automated checks and scorecards to monitor completeness and validity over time. What should be implemented?

A developer can query a virtualized table successfully, but analysts complain the query is slow when joining two large remote sources. Which action is most likely to improve performance while still using Data Virtualization?

A DataStage pipeline intermittently fails with connection errors to a source database. The platform administrator confirms the database is reachable from some pods but not others. What is the most likely cause?

A team is designing a multi-tenant Cloud Pak for Data setup where different departments must isolate their assets and workloads, but share the same platform installation. Which design is the best practice to achieve isolation while enabling controlled collaboration?

A data engineer wants to understand which Cloud Pak for Data service provides a shared governance layer for business terms, policies, and data lineage that can be applied across projects. Which service should be used?

A team created a DataStage flow that loads data into a target table. They want the pipeline to automatically stop and mark the run as failed when data quality checks show more than 1% of rows have null values in a required column. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A project needs to grant read-only access to a curated dataset for many consumers while ensuring the dataset remains governed and searchable in a central catalog. What is the recommended way to share the dataset in Cloud Pak for Data?

A company wants analysts to query multiple remote data sources through a single SQL endpoint without physically moving the data. They also want to apply consistent column masking rules for sensitive fields. Which capability best fits this requirement?

A DataStage job that reads from a large source table is running slowly. The database team reports the query is doing full table scans because the generated SQL cannot use an existing index. What is the best first action for the data engineer?

A data engineer is designing a reusable ingestion pattern in Cloud Pak for Data. Multiple teams need to parameterize file locations and run the same pipeline for dev, test, and prod without editing the flow each time. What is the best approach?

A governed catalog contains a curated table. A data engineer wants to ensure that anyone who uses the table can trace it back to its source systems and transformations, including ETL steps. Which feature provides this end-to-end visibility?

A team is deploying Cloud Pak for Data on OpenShift and needs to isolate workloads by controlling CPU/memory usage and limiting which nodes certain services can run on. Which design choice best supports this requirement?

After adding a new data source connection, users can see the connection asset but cannot access the data when running queries. The error indicates insufficient privileges at runtime. What is the most likely cause?

A DataStage pipeline must process personally identifiable information (PII). The organization requires that sensitive columns be masked for most users but remain visible to a small set of privileged users. The solution must work consistently whether users access the data through SQL or through published assets. Which architecture best meets this requirement?

A data engineer needs to quickly understand how IBM Cloud Pak for Data services run on the cluster (for example, which components are managed by the platform and which are workload-specific). Which statement best describes the Cloud Pak for Data architecture?

A team wants to publish a set of curated tables for other users while ensuring consistent definitions and easy discovery. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability is most appropriate to use for publishing and discovery?

A data engineer is building an ETL flow that reads from an operational database and loads a data warehouse. The load should include only rows that changed since the last successful run. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A data engineer uses DataStage to join two large datasets. The job is slow and shows significant data movement between nodes in a parallel environment. Which design change most directly reduces network I/O during the join?

An organization wants to ensure that sensitive columns (for example, national ID) are protected in discovered datasets. They want policies that can automatically apply masking rules based on data classification. Which combination best supports this requirement?

A BI team needs to query data from multiple sources through a single SQL endpoint without copying data. They also want to restrict what schemas are exposed to the BI tool. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability should the data engineer use?

After publishing an asset to a governed catalog, a user can see the asset metadata but cannot preview or download the data. The user believes they have access to the catalog. What is the most likely cause?

A DataStage job intermittently fails when writing to an object storage target with errors indicating temporary network timeouts. The team wants a resilient design that minimizes partial loads and supports safe retries. Which approach is best?

A company is implementing Data Virtualization. Some virtual queries are slow because predicates are not being pushed down to the remote database, resulting in large data transfers. What is the most effective action to improve performance?

A team must ensure only approved, validated datasets are used to build downstream pipelines, and they need an auditable process for promotion from development to production usage. Which approach best satisfies this requirement in Cloud Pak for Data?

A data engineer needs to create a reusable environment for multiple team members to run notebooks and access shared data assets in IBM Cloud Pak for Data. Which approach best supports collaboration while keeping assets organized?

A DataStage job writes to a target database and then calls a stored procedure to update audit tables. The stored procedure must run only if the data load commits successfully. What is the best design?

A data steward needs to ensure that only approved business terms are used when labeling columns in curated datasets. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability is most appropriate?

A team virtualizes multiple data sources and reports poor query performance when users run similar queries repeatedly. They want to improve performance without changing source systems. What should they do?

A pipeline fails intermittently with an error indicating the container was evicted due to memory pressure. What is the best corrective action?

A data engineer must ingest daily CSV files from object storage, standardize column types, and load them into a target database. The solution should be easy to operationalize and include built-in orchestration. Which approach fits best?

A governance lead wants datasets containing personal data to be automatically flagged and handled according to policy when they are added to the catalog. Which feature supports this requirement?

A virtualized query joining two large tables from different remote databases is running slowly. The engineer wants to reduce data movement and improve performance. What is the best approach?

A DataStage job reads from a database and becomes progressively slower over time. Logs show increasing time spent waiting on database locks. What is the most appropriate first step to troubleshoot?

A team wants to enforce least-privilege access so that developers can build ETL jobs but cannot publish governed assets to the enterprise catalog. Where should this separation be primarily implemented?

A data engineer must provide a curated, read-only dataset to multiple analysts while preventing them from viewing or changing the underlying raw tables. Which approach best meets this requirement in IBM Cloud Pak for Data?

A team is ingesting daily CSV files from object storage into Cloud Pak for Data. They want a no-code method to standardize column names, remove extra whitespace, and output a clean table for downstream use. Which tool is most appropriate?

A user can successfully log in to Cloud Pak for Data but cannot see any projects or catalogs they expect to access. What is the most likely cause?

A company wants to enforce that all customer data assets contain a specific set of mandatory metadata fields (e.g., data owner, sensitivity, retention). Which capability best supports this requirement?

A pipeline loads data into a warehouse table each night. Some nights produce duplicate rows because the source file can include previously delivered records. The team needs an idempotent load pattern. What is the best approach?

A data engineer virtualizes multiple remote data sources and notices repeated queries are slow due to network latency. They want to improve performance without permanently replicating all data. Which Data Virtualization feature should they use?

A governed catalog contains sensitive HR datasets. Analysts should be able to discover these assets but only see masked values for salary and national ID fields unless they have elevated access. What is the recommended solution?

A DataStage job fails intermittently with connection timeouts to an external database. The network team claims there are brief outages. What is the best way to increase resiliency at the job level?

A team has implemented column masking policies in governance. However, users querying through Data Virtualization still see unmasked values. What is the most likely configuration issue?

A company wants to support multiple tenant teams on the same Cloud Pak for Data cluster. Each team requires separation of assets and compute resources while still allowing shared governance standards. Which architecture approach best fits?