Data Processing Interview Questions

28 real Data Processing questions asked in live technical interviews — each with a model answer. Updated weekly.

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When you execute this notebook, how many stages will be created in the backend?🟡 Medium · Conceptual · Asked 25×How can you deal with large files in a data processing pipeline?🟡 Medium · Conceptual · Asked 2×Given a dataset containing session ID, timestamp, and lane information, identify the exact timestamp where a lane change event occurred and ensure that the vehicle remained in the new lane for at least one second.🟡 Medium · Coding · Asked 1×I have a very large 20 GB file that I receive from a vendor. I want to process this file using Spark. How would you decide how to split this file into multiple chunks, and how would you set the partitions based on the data? What strategy would you use?🟡 Medium · Conceptual · Asked 1×Can you explain how a broadcast join works?🟢 Easy · Conceptual · Asked 1×Suppose you have a large dataset that does not fit into memory. How would you process that data?🟡 Medium · Conceptual · Asked 1×What is DPT and why do we use it?🟢 Easy · Conceptual · Asked 1×How would you use a Spark window function with row_number() partitioned by customer and ordered by timestamp descending to get the latest order per customer?🟡 Medium · Coding · Asked 1×Which AWS service do you use for data querying and data processing?🟡 Medium · Conceptual · Asked 1×Let's say you have used re-partition and it has increased shuffling, but it's not helping. How would you handle it?🟡 Medium · Debugging · Asked 1×What are the different ways available in PySpark on Databricks to handle large data ingestion scenarios, and is there a particular approach that is recommended?🟡 Medium · Conceptual · Asked 1×What options are available in PySpark on Databricks to handle scenarios involving large datasets and joins?🟡 Medium · Conceptual · Asked 1×JSON format is available in the raw folder. The task is to read a particular file from that location and perform an operation to identify duplicates.🟡 Medium · Coding · Asked 1×Which Python libraries will you use for processing?🟡 Medium · Conceptual · Asked 1×In a scenario where ball numbers may repeat, how would you calculate the average score per over?🟡 Medium · Coding · Asked 1×Is AWS Glue used for real‑time data batch processing, and are we using the same Glue service for handling both batch and streaming workloads?🟡 Medium · Conceptual · Asked 1×Can Glue be replaced with Athena? What other tools can replace Glue? What is the basic use of Glue? What is the main use of Glue in a project? Since EMR can also be used and is less costly, is there any particular reason to use Glue?🟡 Medium · Conceptual · Asked 1×Given a list of records with amounts and currencies, convert all USD amounts to EUR and add the converted amounts to each record.🟡 Medium · Coding · Asked 1×Suppose 100 GB of files arrive in an S3 bucket every day and need to be processed and loaded into a data warehouse. Which AWS services would you use and why? Consider factors such as flexibility, cost, scalability, and error recovery.🔴 Hard · System Design · Asked 1×Which AWS platform is used to run and transform Spark jobs, and what parameters are required to trigger a Spark transformation?🟡 Medium · Conceptual · Asked 1×Does AWS Lambda have limitations when processing training data larger than 100 MB?🟡 Medium · Conceptual · Asked 1×Can AWS Lambda process 10 GB of data?🟡 Medium · Conceptual · Asked 1×Give me one of the projects that involved Flink.🟡 Medium · Behavioral · Asked 1×Can you tell what the Catalyst optimizer in Spark is?🟡 Medium · Conceptual · Asked 1×What is a watermark column?🟢 Easy · Conceptual · Asked 1×If we are going to discuss handling 10,000 records efficiently, which mechanism can we use?🟡 Medium · Conceptual · Asked 1×Given a file containing JSON records, de‑duplicate the contents based on event_id. If multiple records share the same event_id, keep only one.🟡 Medium · Coding · Asked 1×Given a file containing JSON records, de‑duplicate the contents based on event_id. If multiple records share the same event_id, keep only one.🟡 Medium · Coding · Asked 1×

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