IBM Cloud Pak for Data V3.x Data Engineer Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

A large financial institution is implementing Cloud Pak for Data across multiple data centers with strict data residency requirements. They need to ensure that certain datasets never leave specific geographic regions while still allowing global users to query aggregated results. The solution must support real-time queries and maintain GDPR compliance. Which architectural pattern best addresses these requirements?

During a critical DataStage job execution, you notice that parallel jobs are experiencing significant performance degradation with node contention. The job processes 500GB of data across 16 partitions, but CPU utilization is asymmetric with some nodes at 95% and others at 20%. Database connectors show intermittent timeout errors. What is the MOST likely root cause and optimal solution?

An organization has implemented Watson Knowledge Catalog with automated data quality rules and business glossary integration. After six months, data stewards report that critical data quality issues are being flagked but remediation is slow because data engineers cannot determine the downstream impact of fixing quality issues in source systems. Which combination of features should be configured to address this challenge?

A DataStage job processes real-time CDC (Change Data Capture) feeds from multiple Oracle databases and must maintain exactly-once semantics while handling network interruptions and source system failures. The job intermittently creates duplicate records during recovery scenarios. Which architectural approach ensures exactly-once processing guarantees?

An enterprise has 50+ heterogeneous data sources that need to be virtualized in Cloud Pak for Data. Performance testing reveals that complex joins across virtualized sources are timing out, with query plans showing full table scans on remote sources. The architecture team must optimize performance while maintaining real-time data access. What combination of techniques provides the best performance improvement?

A Cloud Pak for Data deployment is experiencing intermittent pod restarts in the DataStage runtime environment. Analysis shows that IIS-tier pods are being OOMKilled during peak processing hours, but resource quotas appear adequate based on average utilization. Jobs larger than 100GB frequently fail with cryptic 'communication failure' errors. What diagnostic approach and solution should be implemented?

A multinational corporation needs to implement a data governance framework where business terms must be consistently applied across 15 different business units, each with their own data domains and conflicting terminology. Data stewards from different units cannot agree on standard definitions. Which governance implementation strategy best addresses this organizational challenge?

A DataStage environment processes sensitive healthcare data and must implement column-level encryption for PII fields while maintaining the ability to perform joins on encrypted fields across multiple jobs. The solution must not significantly impact job performance and must support key rotation. Which implementation approach meets these requirements?

After implementing Data Virtualization with multiple data sources, query performance monitoring reveals that certain queries trigger full data transfers from remote sources despite filter predicates being specified. The execution plans show filter operations occurring in the Data Virtualization layer rather than being pushed down. What is the most likely cause and solution?

A Cloud Pak for Data environment hosts multiple projects with varying security requirements. A data engineering team needs to share DataStage assets and connection definitions across projects while ensuring that production credentials are never exposed in development projects, yet development teams need to test with production-like connection configurations. Which architecture best implements this secure asset sharing pattern?