50 IBM Assessment: High Volume Data Migration v4 Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

A migration team must estimate the total time required to move 120 TB from an on-premises database to a target platform. Network bandwidth varies throughout the day, and the team has limited historical throughput data. What is the BEST first step to create a reliable migration schedule?

During migration planning, which artifact most directly reduces the risk of missing dependent objects (such as sequences, triggers, and stored procedures) when moving a large schema?

A team is using a high-volume migration tool that supports parallel extraction and loading. Which configuration change most directly improves throughput when the source and target can handle additional load?

A data quality check shows that some source fields contain trailing spaces and inconsistent letter casing. The target system enforces strict matching on these fields for downstream joins. What is the BEST approach during migration?

A customer requires continuous operations during migration with minimal downtime. They plan an initial bulk load followed by ongoing change capture until cutover. What migration pattern BEST matches this requirement?

After migrating multiple large tables, row counts match between source and target, but aggregate totals (SUM of amount) differ for a subset of records. What is the MOST likely root cause?

During performance testing of a bulk load, the target database shows high I/O wait and the load throughput plateaus even after increasing parallel threads. What is the BEST next action?

A migration plan includes loading child tables before parent tables to maximize parallelism. The target enforces foreign keys during load, and the job fails. What is the BEST practice to avoid this failure while preserving referential integrity?

A bank must migrate 80 TB with CDC. During cutover rehearsal, a backlog of changes accumulates and never drains, even though the target load is fast. Metrics show the CDC capture process is falling behind on the source. What is the MOST effective remediation strategy?

A migration uses parallel bulk loads into the target. Post-load validation finds intermittent duplicates in a table that should be unique by a business key. The source has no duplicates. The team suspects race conditions across parallel partitions. What is the BEST solution that preserves performance and correctness?

During migration planning, a team must estimate downtime tolerance and define cutover steps for a 24x7 customer portal database. Which artifact best captures the sequence of activities, rollback points, and go/no-go criteria?

A migration team wants to reduce business risk by prioritizing which datasets to migrate first. Which planning approach is MOST appropriate?

A team is using IBM InfoSphere DataStage to migrate data. They want to maximize throughput and avoid writing custom code for common sources/targets. Which DataStage capability best supports this goal?

A company migrates from multiple source systems into a target where customer records must be deduplicated. Some sources use different spellings and formatting. Which approach best supports consistent matching during migration?

After an initial load, the target system shows orphaned child rows that reference missing parent keys. The migration used bulk loads with constraints disabled for speed. What is the BEST corrective action to prevent recurrence while maintaining performance?

A migration uses a change data capture (CDC) approach to keep the target in sync until cutover. The business requires a near-zero downtime cutover. Which cutover step is MOST critical to ensure data consistency at switchover?

A bulk load into the target database is slower than expected. Monitoring shows high wait time on log I/O and frequent log file switches. Which tuning action is MOST likely to improve load performance without changing the data model?

A DataStage job reading from a source database and writing to a target is running slower after increasing the number of parallel nodes. CPU usage is low, but network utilization is saturated. What is the MOST likely cause and best next step?

A financial institution must migrate tens of billions of rows with strict auditability. They require end-to-end reconciliation that proves completeness and accuracy, even when transformations occur. Which reconciliation design is MOST appropriate?

A migration team must meet a tight cutover window. The initial load is done, and only incremental changes remain. However, CDC latency spikes unpredictably during peak hours. Which architecture change is MOST effective to stabilize latency and protect the cutover timeline?

During migration planning, a team must decide between a one-time bulk load and a continuous replication approach. The business requires near-zero downtime, but can tolerate a short read-only window. Which planning outcome BEST supports this requirement?

A project is migrating multiple TB of relational data to a new platform. The team wants to reduce risk by validating early and often, without waiting for full cutover. Which approach is MOST appropriate?

A migration team is evaluating tools for moving data from heterogeneous sources into a target warehouse. They need a visual flow designer, built-in connectors, and the ability to orchestrate transformations. Which IBM tool capability BEST matches this need?

A team is implementing CDC-based migration. After the initial load, the target lags behind by hours. Network bandwidth is stable and the source CPU is low. Which action is MOST likely to reduce the lag?

A data transformation step converts a VARCHAR column containing numeric identifiers into an INTEGER type on the target. Some rows fail due to leading/trailing spaces and occasional non-numeric characters. What is the BEST remediation approach?

A migration requires moving files and database extracts from on-premises to IBM Cloud. Security mandates encryption in transit and at rest, and operations wants resumable transfers for very large objects. Which design is MOST appropriate?

During migration validation, row counts match between source and target, but business users report incorrect totals in financial reports. Which validation method MOST effectively detects this class of issue?

A bulk load into the target database is significantly slower than expected. Monitoring shows high wait time on transaction log writes and frequent checkpoints. The load uses single-row inserts with autocommit enabled. What change is MOST likely to improve throughput while maintaining recoverability?

A team uses CDC to replicate from a source system where a nightly job performs large UPDATE statements that touch most rows. The CDC pipeline falls behind during the window. Which strategy BEST mitigates this without sacrificing data integrity?

A migration includes PII and must meet governance requirements. The target analytics environment should not store raw PII, but must support consistent customer-level analysis across datasets. Which design BEST meets these requirements?

During migration assessment, a team discovers that the target system has stricter constraints (NOT NULL and UNIQUE) than the legacy source. What is the BEST planning action to reduce cutover risk?

A project must migrate 120 TB from an on-premises NFS file share to IBM Cloud Object Storage while minimizing custom scripting and providing restart/resume for large transfers. Which IBM approach is MOST appropriate?

A migration team needs to ensure that character encodings are handled correctly when moving text data from a legacy system with mixed encodings into a UTF-8 target. What is the BEST practice?

After starting a bulk load, a team sees many errors due to duplicate business keys. They need a quick way to identify whether duplicates originate in the source or were introduced during extract/transform. What is the MOST effective first step?

A bank is planning a near-zero-downtime migration from a legacy database to a new platform. They intend to do an initial full load, then continuously apply changes until cutover. Which migration pattern does this describe?

A team is selecting a migration tool for moving data from multiple relational sources into a target data warehouse and wants built-in connectivity, transformations, scheduling, and monitoring with minimal custom code. Which IBM technology is MOST aligned with this requirement?

During transformation, a team must ensure referential integrity when migrating parent/child tables where some child rows reference missing parents in the legacy system. What is the BEST approach to maintain data quality in the target?

A bulk load into the target database is slow. Monitoring shows low CPU utilization on the target, but very high disk I/O wait and frequent small writes to the transaction log. Which change is MOST likely to improve load performance while keeping data consistent?

A healthcare organization must migrate sensitive data and prove that no records were altered in transit. They also need an auditable trail of validation results. Which validation design BEST meets these requirements?

A team is troubleshooting intermittent timeouts during parallel data extraction from a source database. The source shows spikes in lock waits and deadlocks when multiple extraction threads run. What is the BEST remediation to reduce contention without sacrificing completeness?

During early planning, a team must migrate 120 TB from an on-premises data warehouse to a target platform with only a 10-hour cutover window. Network bandwidth is limited and inconsistent. What is the BEST first step to reduce migration risk?

A migration team needs to keep source and target data synchronized for several days while users remain active on the source system, then perform a short final cutover. Which approach is MOST appropriate?

While transforming data, the team finds that phone numbers are stored in multiple formats (e.g., "(555)123-4567", "555.123.4567", "+1-555-123-4567"). What is the BEST practice to improve data quality for the target system?

A team is selecting between online transfer and physical transfer for a multi-terabyte migration. The main constraint is a strict completion deadline, and the network path is shared with other critical workloads. Which factor MOST strongly indicates physical transfer is the better option?

After an initial load, reconciliation shows the target table has more rows than the source. There are no duplicates in the source primary key. Which is the MOST likely root cause in the migration process?

A migration uses parallel extract and load. Performance is poor even though CPU is low on both source and target. Monitoring shows high I/O wait on the target storage subsystem. What is the BEST tuning action to try first?

A migration design must allow restart after failure without reloading already-committed data. Which technique MOST directly supports this requirement?

During assessment, stakeholders disagree on acceptable downtime and data loss (RTO/RPO) for the cutover. What is the BEST deliverable to drive alignment and finalize the migration approach?

A CDC pipeline is configured to replicate changes from source to target. After several hours, lag grows steadily even though the target has spare CPU and I/O. Investigation shows a small number of "hot" tables with very high update rates. What is the BEST architectural adjustment to reduce lag?

A transformation maps customer records from multiple sources into a single target "golden record". During validation, the team discovers inconsistent merges due to non-deterministic matching when two candidates score equally. What is the BEST fix to ensure repeatable, auditable outcomes?