IBM Cloud Pak for Data v4.x Solution Architect Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

A multinational organization is deploying Cloud Pak for Data across multiple OpenShift clusters in different regions. They require unified governance with centralized metadata management while allowing local data processing to comply with data residency requirements. The solution must handle metadata synchronization conflicts when the same asset is modified in multiple regions. Which architectural approach best addresses these requirements?

During a Cloud Pak for Data upgrade from v4.0 to v4.6, the upgrade operator pod enters a CrashLoopBackOff state after successfully completing the control plane upgrade. Analysis shows that custom service operators for DataStage and Watson Machine Learning have version compatibility issues. The environment has active production workloads that cannot be interrupted. What is the most appropriate recovery strategy?

An enterprise has implemented data virtualization in Cloud Pak for Data to provide a unified view across Oracle, DB2, and Hadoop data sources. Query performance has degraded significantly when users run complex joins involving more than three data sources. The Data Virtualization manager shows high memory consumption and CPU throttling. Network bandwidth is adequate. Which optimization strategy would most effectively address this performance issue?

A financial services company uses Watson Knowledge Catalog to enforce data governance policies. They need to implement dynamic data masking that applies different masking rules based on the user's role, data classification level, and the geographic location from which the data is accessed. The solution must work transparently across DataStage jobs, Watson Studio notebooks, and direct database queries. Which implementation approach satisfies these requirements?

A data science team is experiencing intermittent failures in Watson Machine Learning model deployments. Models train successfully but deployment fails approximately 30% of the time with 'insufficient resources' errors, despite cluster monitoring showing adequate CPU and memory available. Investigation reveals that deployments succeed when manually retried. The cluster uses storage backed by Portworx with dynamic provisioning. What is the most likely root cause and solution?

An organization plans to deploy Cloud Pak for Data on a multi-zone OpenShift cluster with nodes distributed across three availability zones. They require high availability for critical services (Watson Studio, Watson Machine Learning, Watson Knowledge Catalog) with RPO of 1 hour and RTO of 30 minutes. The storage solution must support ReadWriteMany access mode. Which storage and topology configuration best meets these requirements?

After upgrading OpenShift from 4.10 to 4.12, Cloud Pak for Data services start experiencing certificate validation errors. The platform certificate manager shows certificates are valid and not expired. User access to the Cloud Pak for Data web interface works correctly, but internal service-to-service communication fails intermittently. Pod logs show 'x509: certificate signed by unknown authority' errors. What is the most likely cause and resolution?

A company is implementing a DataStage pipeline that processes sensitive customer data. Governance requirements mandate that data lineage must capture not only which datasets were used but also which specific rows from source tables contributed to each output record, with this information retained for 7 years. The pipeline processes 50 million records daily across 20+ transformations. Which approach balances governance requirements with operational feasibility?

A Watson Studio environment is experiencing OOMKilled errors in notebook runtime pods despite users reporting they are working with datasets under the configured memory limits. Analysis shows memory usage gradually increases over multiple cell executions and doesn't decrease after cell completion. The environment uses custom Python runtime images with additional machine learning libraries. What is the most effective solution?

An enterprise is implementing Cloud Pak for Data with integration to an external LDAP directory for authentication and SAML-based SSO. They require that user access to specific data assets in Watson Knowledge Catalog be determined dynamically based on LDAP group membership, with groups potentially having thousands of members. Asset permissions must reflect LDAP changes within 15 minutes. The solution must scale to 10,000+ users and 100,000+ assets. Which approach provides the required functionality and performance?