50 IBM Cloud Pak for Data v4.x Solution Architect Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

An enterprise plans to deploy IBM Cloud Pak for Data on Red Hat OpenShift and wants to minimize risk during sizing. They need to understand which workloads will be containerized and how service components affect CPU/memory planning. Which planning activity is MOST appropriate first?

A data engineer wants to provide business users with a single SQL endpoint to query multiple data sources without copying data into a new warehouse. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best fits this requirement?

A governance team needs to standardize business terminology (for example, 'Customer', 'Account', 'Active') and ensure consistent meaning across catalogs and projects. Which artifact should they primarily create?

A solution architect is deciding where to organize assets (data assets, notebooks, models) for a cross-functional team working on a single use case. Which Cloud Pak for Data construct is the MOST appropriate place to collaborate and manage those assets together?

A company must allow analysts to query sensitive data through Data Virtualization, but some columns (e.g., SSN) must be protected based on user role. Which approach is MOST appropriate to enforce this consistently?

A team wants to populate a governed catalog with technical metadata from several databases and automatically classify columns (e.g., detect emails, national IDs) to accelerate governance. Which capability should be enabled as part of the onboarding workflow?

After a network change, users report they can log in to Cloud Pak for Data but cannot connect to external databases from projects or Data Virtualization. Cluster health checks show pods are running. What is the MOST likely issue to investigate first?

An organization wants to deploy machine learning models with a repeatable promotion path from development to production and strict separation of duties. Which design best supports this requirement in Cloud Pak for Data?

A regulated enterprise requires end-to-end traceability showing which original sources contributed to a curated dataset and which downstream analytics assets consume it. They also need to demonstrate this to auditors without manual documentation. Which combination is MOST appropriate?

A solution must support both Data Virtualization queries and analytics workloads. During peak usage, DV queries are starving other services and causing unstable performance. The platform team wants predictable performance isolation while keeping a single OpenShift cluster. What is the BEST architectural approach?

A solution architect is planning a new IBM Cloud Pak for Data deployment on OpenShift for multiple teams. The platform team requires strong isolation so that one team cannot see or consume another team’s assets by default, while still allowing controlled sharing when approved. Which design best meets this requirement?

A data engineer published a new data asset to a catalog but business users report that it is not appearing in search results. Permissions and catalog membership are confirmed correct. Which is the most likely cause in a governed environment?

A team wants to deploy a Python-based scoring service created in Watson Studio so that applications can request real-time predictions over HTTPS with centralized lifecycle management. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best fits this need?

An organization wants to enable Data Virtualization so analysts can query multiple databases without copying data. The security team requires that database credentials are not embedded in notebooks or shared SQL scripts and that access can be centrally rotated. What is the recommended approach?

A company is implementing governed data access. They want business terms (e.g., “Customer”, “Active Account”) to be consistently applied across catalogs and projects, and to be linked to technical assets for lineage and impact analysis. Which approach best supports this?

A project uses AutoAI to generate candidate models. The compliance team requires that the chosen model’s training data, feature transformations, and evaluation metrics are reproducible and auditable later. Which capability most directly supports this requirement?

A Cloud Pak for Data administrator must provide a secure method for a scheduled pipeline to access a data source without using a shared user’s password. The organization uses OpenShift and wants credentials managed centrally with least privilege. What is the best practice?

A solution architect must design for high availability of Cloud Pak for Data services. The platform team asks what OpenShift-level capability is most important to ensure service pods can be rescheduled when a node fails, and that stateful components remain available. Which answer is most appropriate?

After enabling Data Virtualization, users can query small tables, but joins across two remote sources intermittently fail with timeouts and high latency. Network connectivity is stable, and source systems are responsive. What architectural adjustment is most likely to improve performance for cross-source joins?

A regulated enterprise needs to ensure that only approved, governed data sets are used for model training, and that any training run can be traced back to specific data assets and policy decisions. Which end-to-end design best meets this requirement?

A solution architect needs to plan storage for multiple Cloud Pak for Data services. The environment has separate storage classes for block (RWO) and file (RWX). Which guideline is MOST appropriate when selecting storage classes for Cloud Pak for Data workloads?

A data engineer wants to quickly make an IBM Db2 table available in Cloud Pak for Data for discovery and analysis without copying the data. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A governance team wants sensitive columns to be masked consistently for all consumers accessing data through Cloud Pak for Data, including notebooks and BI tools. What is the recommended capability to enforce this centrally?

A team virtualizes tables from multiple sources and notices that some queries are significantly slower after a new source was added. They suspect unnecessary data movement is occurring. Which Data Virtualization feature should they evaluate FIRST to improve performance?

An organization wants to curate a set of certified data assets and ensure only steward-approved assets appear as "trusted" for self-service analytics. Which design best supports this requirement in Cloud Pak for Data?

A model is trained in Watson Machine Learning and must be deployed so that applications can call it with low latency. The solution must also support controlled promotion from development to production. Which approach is MOST appropriate?

After enabling LDAP integration for Cloud Pak for Data, some users can authenticate but cannot see any projects they were added to previously. The cluster administrator confirms the users are in the right LDAP groups. What is the MOST likely cause?

A bank requires that all data access through Cloud Pak for Data be auditable and that administrators can answer "who accessed which governed asset and when". Which architecture best addresses this requirement?

A company wants to publish governed data products to multiple teams. They want consumers to subscribe to a data product and receive updates to metadata and access rules without needing to re-onboard assets each time. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best fits this requirement?

A solution architect must design for high availability of Cloud Pak for Data on OpenShift. The business requires resilience to a worker node failure without service interruption for critical workloads. Which design choice is MOST aligned with this requirement?

A solution architect is planning a new IBM Cloud Pak for Data deployment on Red Hat OpenShift. The customer requires that core platform services remain available during routine node maintenance. Which architecture choice best supports this requirement?

A data engineer needs to provide analysts a single SQL access layer to query multiple heterogeneous sources (for example, Db2, Oracle, and object storage) without copying the data into a new warehouse. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability is designed for this requirement?

A governance team wants business users to search for trusted datasets, understand lineage, and request access through a controlled workflow. Which Cloud Pak for Data service most directly addresses this need?

A data scientist must deploy a trained model and expose it as a REST endpoint for real-time scoring to multiple applications. Which service should the solution architect recommend?

A customer requires that users authenticate with the corporate identity provider and that group membership centrally controls access to Cloud Pak for Data platform roles. What is the recommended approach?

A team virtualizes data from multiple sources and notices slow query performance when analysts run repeated aggregations over large remote tables. Which Data Virtualization optimization is most appropriate to improve performance while minimizing changes to source systems?

A governed data product must ensure that sensitive columns (for example, SSN) are protected in all downstream consumption, including users accessing data through a catalog. Which approach best enforces consistent protection?

A customer wants to operationalize MLOps by tracking experiments, packaging models, deploying them, and monitoring scoring requests. Which design best aligns with Cloud Pak for Data capabilities?

After enabling governed access, users report that they can see an asset in the catalog but receive authorization errors when attempting to query it through a virtualized connection. The platform administrator confirms the user has catalog access. What is the most likely missing configuration?

A regulated enterprise requires disaster recovery for Cloud Pak for Data. They want the ability to restore the platform and critical metadata (for example, governance artifacts and service configurations) in a second OpenShift cluster after a complete primary-site outage. Which strategy best meets this requirement?

A solution architect must choose a persistent storage approach for IBM Cloud Pak for Data on OpenShift. The cluster has multiple worker nodes and services will scale horizontally. Which storage capability is most critical to ensure stability across pods and restarts?

A team wants business users to discover and understand datasets while ensuring sensitive columns are clearly labeled. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best supports discovery with business-friendly metadata and classifications?

A data engineer created a Data Virtualization view over multiple sources. Business users complain that queries are slow and sometimes time out. Which first action is the most appropriate to improve performance without changing the source systems?

A company needs to expose a curated set of governed datasets to multiple analytics teams. They want each consumer to access data through consistent definitions while the data remains in the source systems when possible. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A governance lead needs to ensure that when datasets are added to a catalog, they are automatically scanned to identify personal data and tagged accordingly. What is the best design in Cloud Pak for Data?

A platform team wants to separate responsibilities: operators manage the OpenShift cluster, while the data platform team administers Cloud Pak for Data services. Which approach aligns best with least privilege and operational best practices?

A data science team must deploy a machine learning model as an online service with consistent, repeatable deployments across environments. Which capability is most appropriate to operationalize and manage model deployments in Cloud Pak for Data?

After integrating a new LDAP identity provider, some users can log in to Cloud Pak for Data but cannot see the expected catalog assets. The catalog administrator confirms the assets exist. What is the most likely cause?

A regulated enterprise requires that data access decisions be enforced consistently whether data is accessed via the catalog, Data Virtualization, or notebooks. They also need centrally managed rules that can be audited. Which architecture best satisfies this requirement?

A company plans to run multiple Cloud Pak for Data services with strict uptime requirements. They have experienced cluster disruptions due to uneven pod placement and node maintenance events. Which design is most effective to increase workload resiliency at the platform level?