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

A customer is planning an IBM Cloud Pak for Data deployment on OpenShift and wants to minimize cross-service access risk while still allowing teams to collaborate. Which approach best aligns with Cloud Pak for Data best practices?

A solution architect needs to recommend storage for Cloud Pak for Data services that require shared access by multiple pods across nodes. Which storage access mode is generally required?

After deploying Cloud Pak for Data, users report they cannot log in with corporate credentials. The OpenShift authentication works, but Cloud Pak for Data does not show the expected identity provider. What is the most likely missing configuration?

A data engineer needs to provide business users a single SQL endpoint that can query multiple heterogeneous sources (for example, Db2, Oracle, and object storage) without moving data. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best fits this requirement?

A customer wants to integrate Cloud Pak for Data with an external enterprise governance tool while ensuring datasets remain discoverable and consistently classified inside Cloud Pak for Data. Which Cloud Pak for Data component should be the system of record for business terms and classifications?

A Cloud Pak for Data deployment must support multiple teams with strict isolation of compute and storage usage to prevent one team from impacting others. Which design is the most appropriate?

A team reports that Data Virtualization queries are slow when joining a virtual table from an external database with a large internal table. They want to improve performance without copying all data. Which action is most appropriate?

A data scientist needs to operationalize a model with controlled access, versioning, and the ability to promote assets from development to production. Which Cloud Pak for Data approach best supports this lifecycle?

During a planned integration, a customer must allow Cloud Pak for Data services to pull images from an enterprise container registry that requires mutual TLS and strict certificate validation. What is the best-practice OpenShift-level approach to support this securely?

A regulated enterprise requires that sensitive columns (for example, SSN) are masked consistently across cataloged assets and also enforced at query time when accessed through Data Virtualization. Which design best meets this requirement in Cloud Pak for Data?

A customer wants to deploy IBM Cloud Pak for Data on OpenShift and must ensure platform services and workloads are isolated for compliance. Which approach is recommended?

A solution architect is asked to minimize user logins across Cloud Pak for Data and existing enterprise applications. Which integration best supports centralized authentication?

A data engineer needs to provide a single logical view of data spread across multiple relational databases without moving the data. Which capability is designed for this use case?

After installing Cloud Pak for Data, users report intermittent access to the web UI through the corporate load balancer. The OpenShift routes exist, but some requests fail. Which is the most likely architectural misconfiguration to check first?

A team wants to allow analysts to query virtualized data sources while ensuring each source system credential is not shared broadly. What is the best practice for credential management in data virtualization?

A customer needs to deploy Cloud Pak for Data in a restricted network where nodes cannot access public container registries. What is the recommended approach to ensure installation and upgrades work reliably?

A solution requires end-to-end lineage from ingestion to curated tables to ML features so governance teams can trace how a model input was produced. Which combination best addresses this requirement in Cloud Pak for Data?

A data science team must deploy trained models and expose them to an internal application with low latency and consistent scaling. What is the recommended Cloud Pak for Data approach?

A customer is designing a multi-tenant Cloud Pak for Data environment. They want to ensure one tenant's heavy workloads do not starve others while keeping administration centralized. Which design is most appropriate?

A data virtualization query that joins multiple large tables across two remote databases becomes significantly slower after a new workload goes live on one of the sources. The customer cannot move data and needs predictable performance. What is the best architectural recommendation?

An enterprise wants to allow several business units to use IBM Cloud Pak for Data independently while still enforcing central governance and shared platform operations. Which approach best supports this requirement?

A Cloud Pak for Data deployment requires outbound internet access only through a corporate proxy. Users report that some services cannot pull external images and some connectors fail to reach external endpoints. Which configuration is MOST likely required to ensure consistent proxy usage across the platform?

A team needs to enable single sign-on to Cloud Pak for Data using an enterprise identity provider (IdP) and ensure group membership drives authorization within the platform. Which capability is MOST appropriate to integrate and map groups to roles?

A solution architect must design a backup strategy for Cloud Pak for Data that supports cluster recovery and minimizes data loss for persistent services. Which approach is MOST aligned with best practices?

A user queries a virtualized table in Data Virtualization and sees inconsistent performance depending on time of day. The source system is a transactional database with variable load. What is the BEST solution to stabilize performance while reducing source impact?

A governance team requires that curated datasets be discoverable enterprise-wide, while sensitive columns must be masked for most users. Which combination of capabilities BEST meets this requirement in Cloud Pak for Data?

A data scientist needs to deploy a model for online scoring with controlled promotion between environments and an approval workflow. Which pattern is MOST appropriate within Cloud Pak for Data?

After integrating Cloud Pak for Data with an external object storage endpoint using a custom certificate chain, several services report TLS handshake failures when accessing the bucket. What is the MOST likely fix?

A company wants to support near-real-time analytics by continuously ingesting events and making them available for downstream machine learning feature generation. Which architecture is MOST appropriate within Cloud Pak for Data ecosystems?

A Cloud Pak for Data instance must meet strict requirements for workload isolation between analytics teams due to regulatory constraints. The platform team wants to avoid multiple clusters. Which design BEST addresses isolation while keeping a single cluster?

A solution architect is designing an IBM Cloud Pak for Data deployment where all user authentication must be centralized and managed by the enterprise identity provider. Which approach best meets this requirement?

A team wants business users to access curated data assets consistently across multiple analytics tools without copying the data into new stores. Which Cloud Pak for Data capability best supports this goal?

A developer needs to call Cloud Pak for Data platform APIs from an external CI/CD pipeline without using a personal user account. What is the recommended approach?

A data steward wants to ensure that only approved, trusted datasets are easy to find and reuse by analysts in Cloud Pak for Data. Which feature best supports this requirement?

A Cloud Pak for Data deployment must support strict network segmentation. The security team requires that platform and service endpoints are only reachable inside the corporate network and not exposed to the public internet. Which design choice best meets this requirement?

After enabling data virtualization, users report that queries against a virtualized view are slow and sometimes time out. The sources are remote and have limited throughput. What is the best first architectural remediation?

A team is deploying Cloud Pak for Data in a regulated environment. They need a repeatable way to promote configuration changes (for example, platform settings and service configurations) across dev, test, and prod while minimizing manual steps. What is the most appropriate approach?

A data science group built a model and needs to provide a governed, scalable way for multiple applications to request real-time predictions. Which Cloud Pak for Data pattern best fits this requirement?

An organization requires end-to-end lineage for analytics assets: from source tables through transformations to curated datasets and reports. They also need auditors to review how a metric was derived. Which solution design best satisfies this requirement in Cloud Pak for Data?

A Cloud Pak for Data platform is integrated with the enterprise IdP. Users can log in, but they cannot access projects they should have access to. The platform admin confirms the users are in the correct corporate groups. What is the most likely cause?

A solution architect is planning IBM Cloud Pak for Data (CPD) for multiple internal teams. The platform team wants each team to be isolated for governance and access control, while still sharing the same CPD installation. Which design best supports this requirement?

A user can access the CPD web console but cannot create analytics projects and receives authorization errors. The user is a member of the correct LDAP group. What is the most likely cause?

A data engineer wants to expose multiple heterogeneous data sources to data scientists without copying data into CPD, and wants them to query it using SQL from notebooks. Which CPD capability best matches this requirement?

A regulated enterprise requires that CPD workloads run only on a dedicated set of OpenShift worker nodes with restricted network access. Which OpenShift/CPD design is most appropriate?

After integrating CPD with an enterprise LDAP, some users intermittently fail to log in, while others succeed. The CPD console is reachable and cluster health is normal. What should be checked first?

A team virtualizes data from several sources using Data Virtualization. They notice significantly degraded query performance when joining a large virtual table from a remote database with a small reference table. What is the best architectural action to improve performance while still minimizing data movement?

A company uses Watson Knowledge Catalog (WKC) to govern datasets. They want to ensure that only approved, curated data assets are discoverable by most users, while stewards can still manage uncurated assets. Which approach best meets this requirement?

An organization wants to deploy a model to be consumed by multiple applications with consistent runtime dependencies, controlled rollout, and monitoring. Which CPD approach is most appropriate?

A solution architect must design CPD for high availability. The business requires continued operation if a worker node fails, and also requires that platform metadata and user assets remain consistent after failures. Which design best satisfies these requirements?

A CPD environment uses Data Virtualization to access a remote database. Users can connect, but complex queries fail with errors indicating the remote source user lacks privileges for certain operations. The architect must resolve this without granting excessive privileges. What is the best practice?