Practice DA0-002 Data Acquisition and Preparation questions with full explanations on every answer.
Start practicing
Data Acquisition and Preparation — choose a session length
Free · No account required
Click any question to see the full explanation and answer options, or start a focused practice session above.
A data analyst is pulling data from a production database for a report. The database contains customer orders with a column 'order_date'. The analyst notices that some orders have dates in the future. Which data quality issue does this represent?
2A data engineer is designing a data pipeline to ingest streaming data from IoT sensors. The sensors send data every second, and the pipeline must handle bursts of up to 10,000 messages per second. Which approach is most appropriate for capturing this data before processing?
3A data analyst needs to combine two datasets: one contains customer information (customer_id, name, address) and the other contains order information (order_id, customer_id, order_date). The analyst wants to include all customers, even those who have not placed orders. Which type of join should be used?
4A data analyst is tasked with extracting data from a legacy system that outputs fixed-width text files. The analyst needs to parse these files into a structured format. Which tool or method is most appropriate for this task?
5A company is merging two databases from different departments. In Database A, customer IDs are integers. In Database B, customer IDs are alphanumeric strings. To merge, the data analyst must reconcile these differences. Which step should be taken first?
6A data analyst needs to extract data from an API that returns JSON. The analyst wants to convert the JSON output into a tabular format for analysis. Which function in a scripting language is commonly used for this purpose?
7A data analyst is building a dataset from multiple sources and needs to ensure data quality. During the data acquisition phase, which activity is most important to perform?
8An organization needs to acquire data from a third-party vendor. The data will be used for regulatory reporting. Which of the following should be the primary consideration before acquiring the data?
9A data analyst is using SQL to extract data. The analyst wants to retrieve all records from a table named 'sales' where the 'amount' column is greater than 100. Which SQL clause should be used?
10Which TWO of the following are common methods for acquiring data from external sources?
11Which THREE of the following are best practices when performing data extraction for a data pipeline?
12Which TWO of the following are valid SQL clauses used to filter and sort data?
13What is the primary purpose of the HAVING clause in the query shown?
14A data analyst sees this error in the ETL logs. What is the most likely cause?
15A healthcare organization is building a data warehouse to support population health analytics. The data sources include: (1) an electronic health record (EHR) system with a relational database containing patient demographics, diagnoses, and medications; (2) a claims system that generates CSV files daily; (3) patient-generated health data from mobile apps via a REST API returning JSON. The data engineer needs to design a data acquisition process that runs nightly. The EHR system has a change tracking mechanism that logs changes with timestamps. The claims CSV files are appended daily. The API supports filtering by date. The data warehouse uses a star schema with fact and dimension tables. The engineer must ensure data consistency and minimize load times. Which approach should the engineer take?
16A retail company is migrating its on-premises data warehouse to a cloud data warehouse. The current ETL process extracts data from a transactional database (SQL Server) and a web analytics system (JSON logs). The ETL runs nightly and takes 6 hours. The business requires that the new cloud warehouse support real-time reporting with data latency of less than 15 minutes. The data engineer proposes using change data capture (CDC) from the SQL Server database and streaming the JSON logs via a message queue. However, management is concerned about cost and complexity. The engineer must design a solution that meets the latency requirement while minimizing operational overhead. Which approach should the engineer recommend?
17A data analyst is merging two datasets from different departments. The analyst notices that the 'CustomerID' field in the first dataset is stored as an integer, while in the second dataset it is stored as a string with leading zeros. Which TWO steps should the analyst take to ensure successful data integration?
18Based on the exhibit, what is the most likely cause of the import failure?
19A marketing company is building a customer segmentation model. The data team has access to two sources: a CRM database with customer demographics and purchase history, and a third-party data provider that offers social media activity scores. The CRM data is updated daily, while the third-party data is refreshed weekly on Sundays. The analyst needs to create a unified dataset for the model training scheduled for Wednesday morning. The analyst runs a SQL query to join the two tables on CustomerID, but the resulting dataset has far fewer rows than expected. Upon investigation, the analyst finds that many customers in the CRM do not have matching records in the third-party data. Additionally, some customers in the third-party data have multiple entries due to unresolved duplicates. The analyst must produce the most complete dataset possible while maintaining data quality. Which course of action should the analyst take?
20Drag and drop the steps to perform a data backup using the 3-2-1 rule in the correct order.
21Drag and drop the steps to perform a data audit in the correct order.
22Match each data analysis technique to its primary purpose.
23Match each database concept to its definition.
24A data analyst needs to collect customer sentiment data from social media platforms. Which data acquisition method is most appropriate?
25A company is merging two customer databases from different acquisitions. They need to identify duplicate records. Which data profiling technique is most effective?
26A data architect is designing an ETL pipeline to ingest streaming data from IoT sensors. The data must be available for real-time analytics. Which acquisition method is best?
27A marketing team wants to collect data on competitor pricing for similar products. Which data source is most appropriate?
28During data acquisition, an analyst notices that the data from an external vendor has inconsistent date formats. What is the first step the analyst should take?
29A data engineer needs to acquire data from a legacy mainframe system that does not support modern APIs or direct database connectivity. Which approach is most feasible?
30A small business wants to acquire customer feedback through a short questionnaire emailed after purchase. Which data acquisition method does this represent?
31An organization is integrating data from multiple sources into a data warehouse. They need to handle differences in data granularity (e.g., daily vs. hourly sales data). Which technique is most appropriate?
32A data analyst is using a public API to collect historical weather data. The API has a rate limit of 100 requests per minute, but the analyst needs to retrieve 10,000 records as quickly as possible. What strategy should be used?
33Which TWO are common methods for acquiring internal data? (Choose two.)
34Which THREE are best practices for data profiling during acquisition? (Choose three.)
35Refer to the exhibit. An analyst runs this query before acquiring data from a PostgreSQL database. What is the primary purpose of this query?
36Refer to the exhibit. An analyst sees this log during data acquisition. What action should be taken first?
37A data analyst is tasked with combining customer data from a CRM system and a billing system. The CRM uses a GUID for customer ID, while billing uses an integer. Which approach should the analyst use to ensure a reliable merge?
38A data team needs to extract data from a legacy system that only supports flat file exports. Which data acquisition method is most appropriate?
39During a data mining project, an analyst discovers that a significant number of records have a negative value for the age field. What is the most appropriate first step?
40Refer to the exhibit. What does the query return?
41Refer to the exhibit. What data quality issue is indicated?
42Refer to the exhibit. If the date column is stored as a string in 'MM/DD/YYYY' format, what will be the result?
43A data analyst needs to identify duplicate customer records. Which TWO methods are commonly used? (Select two.)
44After merging two datasets, an analyst finds that the resulting dataset has many null values in some columns. Which TWO steps should the analyst take to address this? (Select two.)
45Which THREE data sources are suitable for web scraping? (Select three.)
46A retail company wants to analyze customer purchase patterns to identify products frequently bought together. Which data mining technique is most appropriate?
47A data analyst is importing a CSV file that contains a mixture of numeric and text fields. What is the most common issue when importing?
48During data acquisition, a data engineer uses a tool to extract data from a source system incrementally based on a timestamp column. Which method is being used?
49A data analyst discovers that a dataset contains multiple records for the same customer with different spellings (e.g., 'Jon' vs 'John'). Which data preparation step should be applied first?
50A financial institution is merging transaction data from two different systems. System A stores currency amounts as integers in cents, and System B stores as decimals in dollars. What is the best way to integrate the data?
51A data team is integrating customer data from three sources. After joining, they find that the count of unique customers is lower than expected. What is the most likely cause?
52A data analyst needs to merge two customer tables from different sources. One table uses 'CUST_ID' as the primary key, the other uses 'CustomerID'. To ensure accurate merging, the analyst should first:
53A company receives daily sales data in CSV format. The data includes a 'Date' column in MM/DD/YYYY format. To load this into a database that expects YYYY-MM-DD, the analyst should:
54A data analyst is tasked with collecting data from a web API that returns JSON. The API requires an API key in the header. Which method should be used to authenticate?
55An analyst needs to combine two datasets from different sources that share a common key but have different levels of granularity. Dataset A has daily sales per store, Dataset B has hourly foot traffic per store. The analyst wants to analyze correlation. Which approach is appropriate?
56A data team is designing an ETL process to extract data from an operational database daily. The database experiences heavy write loads during business hours. What is the best practice to minimize impact on operations?
57A healthcare organization acquires data from multiple hospitals with different patient record systems. The data includes patient IDs but no common identifier across systems. Which technique should be used to link records?
58A financial analyst is integrating data from multiple stock exchanges. One exchange provides trade timestamps in UTC, another in Eastern Time. The analyst needs accurate time synchronization for time-series analysis. What is the best approach?
59An e-commerce company is merging customer data from three legacy systems. Two systems use email as unique identifier, but one system allows multiple customers per email. The third uses phone number. To create a unified customer view, the analyst should first:
60A data engineer is tasked with acquiring data from a third-party vendor that provides daily file drops via SFTP. The files are large (10 GB each). The pipeline must load data into a data warehouse. Which approach optimizes for speed and reliability?
61A data analyst is validating a dataset acquired from an external source. Which TWO actions are appropriate for data quality assessment?
62A company is acquiring social media data via a public API. Which TWO considerations are important for ensuring ethical and legal compliance?
63A data scientist is merging retail transaction data from online and in-store sources. Which THREE steps are required to ensure data consistency?
64A data analyst receives the above JSON snippet from a web API. The analyst needs to extract the email addresses for all customers. Which JSONPath expression should be used?
65An analyst is reviewing the above SQL query used to acquire data. What does this query retrieve?
66A data pipeline log shows the above error. Which data transformation should be applied during acquisition?
67A marketing team wants to analyze customer sentiment from social media posts. Which data acquisition method is most appropriate?
68A data analyst needs to combine sales data from multiple regional databases with different schemas. Which process is best?
69An organization is acquiring data from an external vendor. The vendor provides a flat file with inconsistent delimiters and missing values. Which step should be performed first in data acquisition?
70A data analyst is tasked with gathering data from a legacy system that only exports CSV files. The files contain headers but no data types. Which tool would best facilitate initial data exploration?
71A company wants to collect real-time clickstream data from its website. Which acquisition method is most suitable?
72A financial institution needs to acquire credit transaction data from multiple sources while ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations. What is the most critical step?
73A data analyst is extracting data from a relational database using SQL. Which clause is essential for limiting the rows retrieved to only those needed?
74An e-commerce company is acquiring product data from multiple supplier APIs. The APIs return JSON with inconsistent field naming conventions. Which data acquisition technique should be applied?
75A data team is using web scraping to collect competitor pricing data. The target website has anti-scraping measures like CAPTCHAs and rate limiting. Which approach is most effective?
76Which TWO are examples of internal data sources? (Select exactly 2)
77A data analyst is evaluating data quality issues during acquisition. Which TWO issues are most likely to arise from merging data from different sources? (Select exactly 2)
78Which THREE are best practices for acquiring data via web scraping? (Select exactly 3)
79Refer to the exhibit. What is the most likely issue causing the unexpectedly low count?
80Refer to the exhibit. What is the most likely cause of the extraction failure?
81A retail company is acquiring sales data from 150 stores worldwide. Each store sends daily CSV files via email to a central email address. The data acquisition process is manual: an intern downloads each attachment and copies it into a shared folder. The shared folder is then accessed by an ETL tool that loads data into a data warehouse. Recently, the data warehouse has been missing records for several stores. The intern reports that some emails are not being received or are delayed. The company needs to improve the reliability and timeliness of data acquisition. Which course of action should be taken first?
82A marketing analyst needs to combine customer data from a CRM database with social media engagement data from a third-party API. Which data acquisition method is most appropriate?
83A data analyst is tasked with collecting data from multiple spreadsheets provided by different departments. Each spreadsheet has different column names and formats. What is the best first step?
84A data engineer is designing an ETL pipeline to extract sales data from a legacy on-premise database and load it into a cloud data warehouse. The database is slow and queries during business hours affect performance. Which extraction strategy minimizes impact?
85A research firm is acquiring data from public government databases via API. The API rate limits at 100 requests per minute. They need to download 10,000 records, but each request returns a maximum of 100 records. What is the most efficient approach to ensure complete acquisition without being blocked?
86Which TWO are valid data acquisition methods? (Select two.)
87Which THREE are challenges in acquiring data from external sources? (Select three.)
88A retail company's data analytics team needs to acquire point-of-sale (POS) transaction data from 200 stores daily. Each store sends a CSV file via email at the end of the day. The files often arrive late, have inconsistent column names (e.g., "StoreID", "Store_ID", "store_id"), and occasionally contain corrupted rows. The team manually processes these files, leading to frequent errors and delays. The company wants to automate the acquisition process to ensure data is available by 9 AM the next business day with high quality. Which approach best addresses these issues?
89A healthcare organization collects patient questionnaire data via paper forms at clinics. The forms are scanned and sent to a central office, where staff manually enter data into an electronic system. This process is slow and error-prone. The organization wants to reduce manual entry errors and speed up data availability. Which method should they adopt?
90A logistics company receives GPS tracking data from fleet vehicles at 1-second intervals via a cellular network. The data is used to optimize routes and monitor driver behavior. Recently, the data acquisition system has been missing updates for some vehicles when they pass through tunnels or remote areas. The data team notices gaps during these periods. The company needs a solution to ensure near-real-time data continuity. What should they do?
91An e-commerce company wants to integrate product pricing data from competitor websites to adjust its own prices dynamically. They plan to scrape pricing pages every hour. However, the competitors' websites have anti-scraping measures such as IP blocking and CAPTCHAs. The company's legal team also advises caution regarding terms of service. Which data acquisition strategy is both effective and compliant?
92A financial analytics firm needs to acquire historical stock market tick data (millions of records per day) from a data vendor. The vendor provides data via FTP in binary format. The firm's existing infrastructure uses on-premise servers with limited storage and processing power. They need to stream the data into a cloud data lake for analysis. However, the binary format is proprietary and requires a licensed decoder. The budget is constrained. Which approach best meets the data acquisition requirements?
93A social media monitoring company collects public tweets using the Twitter API. The API has a tiered access: free tier allows 500,000 tweets per month, and paid tier allows 2 million tweets per month. The company needs to collect 1.5 million tweets per month for analysis. They are on a free tier but have been exceeding the limit, causing account suspension. They need a sustainable solution without significantly increasing costs. What should they do?
94A data analyst is performing data acquisition from multiple source files. Which TWO data profiling tasks should the analyst complete before loading the data into the target system?
95Refer to the exhibit. A data analyst is trying to extract data from a SQL Server database but receives the error. Which configuration change should the analyst recommend to the database administrator?
96A large retail company is integrating customer data from two separate CRM systems into a new data warehouse. System A stores customer IDs as integers (e.g., 12345), while System B stores them as alphanumeric strings (e.g., 'CUST-12345-X'). Additionally, some customers exist in both systems but with slight name variations (e.g., 'John Smith' vs 'Jon Smith'). The data warehouse requires a unified customer table with a single unique identifier for each customer. The analyst needs to design the data acquisition process. Which of the following is the most appropriate first step?
97A data analyst needs to retrieve all unique job titles from an employees table. Which SQL keyword should be used in the SELECT clause?
98A data analyst is profiling a new dataset containing customer information. When assessing data quality, which metric would be most appropriate to determine if the 'email' column contains valid email addresses?
99A data analyst is working with a sales table that contains columns: sale_id, product_id, sale_date, and amount. They need to calculate a 7-day moving average of sales amount for each product, ordered by sale_date. Which window function syntax should they use?
100A data analyst needs to extract the year from a column named 'order_date' in a SQL database. The database supports standard SQL functions. Which function should they use?
101A data analyst wants to retrieve the top 5 highest-paid employees from a table named 'employees' that has columns 'employee_id', 'salary', and 'name'. Which SQL query should they use?
102A data analyst is performing exploratory data analysis on a dataset containing house prices. They want to identify outliers in the 'price' column using the IQR method. The first quartile (Q1) is $200,000, the third quartile (Q3) is $350,000, and the IQR is $150,000. What is the upper bound for identifying outliers?
103A data analyst needs to perform stratified sampling on a customer database to ensure proportional representation across three regions: North (40%), South (30%), and West (30%). The total sample size required is 1,000. How many customers should be sampled from the North region?
104A data analyst uses a CTE to find employees who earn more than the average salary in their department. Which SQL clause is used to define the CTE?
105A data analyst is using pandas in Python to merge two DataFrames: sales (columns: sale_id, product_id, amount) and products (columns: product_id, product_name). Which pandas function should they use to combine these DataFrames on the 'product_id' column?
106In SQL, which string function would you use to remove leading and trailing spaces from a column named 'city'?
107A data analyst is writing a query to rank products by total sales amount within each category. They want ties to have the same rank and no gaps in the ranking sequence. Which window function should they use?
108A data analyst needs to count the number of orders placed by each customer, but only for customers who have placed more than 5 orders. Which SQL clause should be used to filter the aggregated results?
109A data analyst is performing data profiling on a customer table. Which TWO of the following are key metrics to assess data quality? (Select TWO.)
110A data analyst is using a recursive CTE to traverse a hierarchical organizational chart. Which THREE components are required to define a recursive CTE? (Select THREE.)
111A data analyst wants to sample a large dataset of customer transactions. Which TWO sampling methods are probability-based and ensure every element has a known chance of being selected? (Select TWO.)
112In a dataset of customer orders, you need to count the number of distinct customers who have placed orders. Which SQL aggregate function should you use?
113You are using pandas in Python to clean a dataset. You notice several rows with missing values in the 'age' column. Which method would you use to remove those rows?
114A data analyst wants to retrieve the top 5 highest-paid employees from an 'employees' table, including ties. Which SQL clause should be used?
115You are analyzing sales data and need to calculate the moving average of monthly sales over the previous 3 months for each month. Which type of function is best suited for this task?
116A data quality assessment reveals that a column named 'email' contains values like 'user@example' (missing domain extension). Which data profiling technique would best identify such pattern violations?
117A data analyst needs to sample 10% of customers from each of three regions (North, South, Central) to ensure proportional representation. Which sampling method should be used?
118In SQL, you want to retrieve all products whose names start with 'Pro'. Which WHERE clause should you use?
119You have a table 'Orders' with columns order_id, customer_id, order_date, and amount. You need to write a query that returns each customer's most recent order date and the amount for that order. Which approach is correct?
120During exploratory data analysis, you calculate the IQR for a numeric column and find that several data points fall below Q1 - 1.5*IQR. These points are likely:
121You have a hierarchical table 'Employees' with columns emp_id, emp_name, manager_id (referencing emp_id). You need to generate a full reporting chain from a given employee up to the CEO. Which SQL construct is most appropriate?
122A data analyst wants to extract the year from a date column 'order_date' in a SQL database. Which function should be used?
123In pandas, you have a DataFrame 'df' with columns 'product' and 'sales'. You want to calculate the total sales per product. Which method should you use?
124A data analyst is performing data profiling on a customer table. Which TWO metrics are most useful for understanding the completeness of the data? (Choose two.)
125A data analyst needs to identify the top 3 most frequent product categories from a sales table. Which SQL techniques can be used to achieve this? (Choose two.)
126A data analyst is cleaning text data in a SQL database. Which THREE string functions are commonly used to standardize and clean text? (Choose three.)
127A data analyst needs to retrieve only unique job titles from the 'employees' table. Which SQL keyword should be used in the SELECT clause?
128A dataset contains sales transactions with columns 'order_date', 'amount', and 'region'. The analyst wants to calculate the total sales per region for orders placed in 2023, but only include regions where total sales exceed $10,000. Which SQL clause should be used to filter the aggregated results?
129In a table 'employee_hierarchy' with columns 'employee_id', 'manager_id', and 'employee_name', an analyst needs to generate a list of all employees under a specific manager, including multiple levels of subordinates. Which SQL construct is most appropriate for querying this hierarchical data efficiently?
130A data analyst runs a query to count the number of customers in each city. The query uses COUNT(*) and GROUP BY city. However, the result includes NULL for some cities. What will COUNT(*) return for a group where the city is NULL?
131A table 'orders' contains columns 'order_id', 'customer_id', 'order_date', and 'total'. An analyst needs to find orders placed between January 1, 2023 and December 31, 2023. Which WHERE clause is correct?
132A data analyst is performing data profiling on a customer dataset. Which metric would best reveal the number of distinct values in the 'state' column?
133An analyst is using Python pandas and has a DataFrame 'sales' with columns 'date', 'product', 'revenue'. They need to create a pivot table showing total revenue per product per month. Which pandas function is most appropriate?
134A dataset contains a 'salary' column. The analyst wants to identify outliers using the IQR method. If Q1 = 40,000 and Q3 = 70,000, what is the upper threshold for a non-outlier?
135An analyst is sampling a large customer database to estimate the average purchase amount. To ensure that the sample proportionally represents different customer segments (e.g., age groups), which sampling method should be used?
136Which SQL aggregate function would an analyst use to calculate the average value of a numeric column?
137A data analyst is cleaning a dataset and finds that some cells in the 'email' column contain leading spaces. Which string function should be used to remove these spaces?
138In a table 'sales_team' with columns 'salesperson', 'quarter', and 'revenue', an analyst wants to assign a rank to each salesperson within their quarter based on revenue, with the highest revenue getting rank 1. However, if two salespeople have the same revenue, they should receive the same rank, and the next rank should be the next consecutive integer (no gaps). Which window function should be used?
139A data analyst is conducting exploratory data analysis (EDA) on a dataset. Which TWO tasks are typically performed during EDA? (Select two.)
140An analyst is using SQL to analyze employee data. Which THREE of the following are valid uses of the WHERE clause? (Select three.)
141A data analyst needs to perform a stratified random sample of a customer database. Which TWO steps are essential for this sampling method? (Select two.)
142A data analyst needs to count the number of distinct product categories in a table named 'products'. Which SQL function should be used in the SELECT clause?
143A data analyst wants to identify customers whose last name starts with 'Mc' from the 'customers' table. Which WHERE clause condition should be used?
144A data analyst is reviewing sales data and wants to find orders where the order total is between $100 and $500, inclusive. Which WHERE clause is correct?
145A data analyst runs the query: SELECT AVG(salary) FROM employees GROUP BY department HAVING AVG(salary) > 60000. What is the purpose of the HAVING clause?
146Which SQL function can be used to extract the year from a date column 'order_date'?
147A data analyst wants to assign a unique sequential integer to each row in a result set, starting at 1, based on the order of the 'sales_amount' column descending. Which window function should be used?
148A data analyst is using a recursive CTE to traverse an organizational hierarchy. What is the purpose of the anchor member in the recursive CTE?
149A data analyst is profiling a dataset and finds that the 'email' column contains some NULL values. Which SQL query can be used to count how many rows have a NULL email?
150Which data sampling method involves selecting every k-th element from a list after a random start?
151A data analyst is using pandas to read a CSV file named 'sales.csv'. Which line of code correctly reads the file into a DataFrame?
152A data analyst is using the IQR method to identify outliers in a dataset. The first quartile (Q1) is 25 and the third quartile (Q3) is 45. What is the upper bound for identifying outliers?
153A data analyst needs to create a new column 'full_name' by concatenating 'first_name' and 'last_name' with a space. Which SQL function should be used in the SELECT clause?
154A data analyst is performing data profiling on a customer table. Which TWO metrics are commonly used to assess the completeness of a column? (Select TWO.)
155A data analyst is investigating a correlation between two continuous variables. Which THREE of the following are appropriate steps in this exploratory data analysis? (Select THREE.)
156A data analyst wants to retrieve the top 5 highest-paid employees from the 'employees' table. Which SQL clauses could be used to achieve this? (Select TWO.)
157A data analyst wants to find the top 5 products by total sales amount, but only for products that have been sold more than 50 times. Which SQL query accomplishes this?
158An analyst needs to compute a running total of sales for each department, ordered by date. Which window function is most appropriate?
159A data analyst wants to generate a report showing employee names and their department names, but some employees are not assigned to any department. The analyst wants to include all employees. Which JOIN type should be used?
160A dataset contains a column 'birthdate' in 'YYYY-MM-DD' format. The analyst needs to calculate the average age of customers as of today. Which combination of functions is most appropriate?
161A data analyst is performing data profiling on a customer table. Which metric would best help identify missing values in the 'phone' column?
162A data analyst wants to randomly select 100 customers from a database for a survey, ensuring that the sample reflects the proportion of male and female customers in the population. Which sampling method is most appropriate?
163In a table with columns 'employee_id' and 'manager_id', a data analyst needs to retrieve the hierarchy level of each employee, where the top manager has manager_id NULL. Which SQL feature is best suited?
164A data analyst is using pandas in Python to clean a dataset. Which method is most appropriate to replace missing numerical values with the median of the column?
165An analyst wants to identify outliers in a dataset using the IQR method. Which values are typically considered outliers?
166A dataset contains transaction amounts with a few extremely high values. The analyst wants to reduce the impact of these outliers on the average. Which measure of central tendency is most robust?
167A data analyst uses a CTE to simplify a complex query. Which keyword is used to define a CTE?
168A data analyst is exploring a sales dataset and wants to identify columns that are likely to be foreign keys. Which TWO characteristics would indicate a foreign key?
169A data analyst is using Python pandas to perform exploratory data analysis. Which THREE methods are commonly used to assess data quality and distributions?
170A data analyst needs to sample records from a large dataset for a quick analysis. Which TWO sampling methods are examples of probability sampling?
171A data analyst runs the following query: SELECT DISTINCT city FROM customers. What is the primary purpose of using the DISTINCT keyword in this query?
172In a sales database, an analyst needs to retrieve all orders where the order amount is between $100 and $500. Which WHERE clause should be used?
173A data analyst uses the following query: SELECT department, AVG(salary) AS avg_salary FROM employees GROUP BY department HAVING AVG(salary) > 50000. What is the purpose of the HAVING clause in this query?
174A data analyst wants to concatenate first_name and last_name columns with a space in between. Which string function combination should be used in SQL?
175An analyst needs to retrieve the year from an order_date column (datetime type). Which function should be used in SQL?
176A data analyst is using a window function to assign a unique rank to each employee within their department based on salary, with ties receiving the same rank and leaving gaps. Which function should be used?
177A data analyst needs to create a recursive CTE to traverse a hierarchical employee-manager table. Which of the following is a key requirement for a recursive CTE?
178A data analyst is performing data profiling on a customer table. Which metric provides the number of unique values in a column?
179A data analyst wants to ensure a sample proportionally represents different regions in a population. Which sampling method should be used?
180During EDA, an analyst calculates the Z-score for each data point in a dataset. A data point with a Z-score of 3.5 is identified. What does this indicate?
181A data analyst uses Python's pandas library to read a CSV file into a DataFrame. Which function is used to read the file?
182An analyst writes a SQL query that uses a window function: SELECT employee_id, salary, LAG(salary, 1) OVER (ORDER BY salary DESC) AS prev_salary FROM employees. What does the LAG function return for the row with the highest salary?
183A data analyst needs to identify duplicate customer records based on email and phone number. Which SQL techniques can be used to find duplicates? (Select TWO).
184A data analyst is performing EDA on a dataset with numerical features. Which methods are appropriate for identifying outliers? (Select TWO).
185An analyst needs to aggregate sales data by region and product, then sort the results by total sales in descending order. Which SQL clauses are required? (Select THREE).
186A data analyst needs to retrieve all unique job titles from the employees table. Which SQL clause should be used with the SELECT statement?
187A data analyst wants to find customers whose last name starts with 'Mc' and have made purchases in 2023. The purchase table has a purchase_date column. Which SQL query accomplishes this?
188A data analyst is writing a query to rank products by total sales within each category, showing dense rank and avoiding gaps. Which window function should be used?
189An analyst needs to count the number of orders per customer but only for customers who have placed more than 5 orders. Which SQL construct allows filtering after aggregation?
190A data analyst wants to create a temporary result set that can be referenced within a single SQL statement. Which feature should be used?
191A data analyst is using pandas to clean a DataFrame. They need to replace missing values in the 'age' column with the median age. Which method should they use?
192During data profiling, an analyst wants to identify the number of distinct values in a column. Which SQL function should be used?
193A data analyst needs to sample 1000 customers from a database of 100,000 customers for a survey, ensuring every customer has an equal chance of selection. Which sampling method is most appropriate?
194In a dataset of employee salaries, the analyst notices one value that is significantly higher than the rest. Using the IQR method, which values are typically considered outliers?
195A data analyst wants to combine first_name and last_name columns into a single full_name column in a SQL query. Which string function should be used?
196A data analyst needs to calculate the running total of sales for each product over time. Which window function clause is essential for this calculation?
197An analyst is performing EDA and wants to measure the strength and direction of linear relationship between two continuous variables. Which statistical measure should they compute?
198A data analyst is validating referential integrity between orders and customers tables. Which TWO of the following checks should the analyst perform?
199An analyst is using a CTE to compute hierarchical data. Which TWO statements about recursive CTEs are true?
200A data analyst wants to export a summary report from a DataFrame in pandas. Which THREE methods are commonly used for data export?
201A data analyst is using SQL to filter a sales table for transactions that occurred in either 'Q1' or 'Q3' of 2023 and have a sale amount greater than $100. Which WHERE clause correctly implements this condition?
202A data analyst is reviewing a dataset of customer transactions and wants to assess data quality by profiling the 'order_date' column. Which TWO profiling tasks are most appropriate for this date column? (Select TWO).
203An e-commerce company wants to analyze sales performance across product categories. The dataset includes transaction amounts and a column 'category' with values (Electronics, Clothing, Home). The analyst decides to use stratified sampling to ensure proportional representation. Which THREE steps are required to implement this? (Select THREE).
204A data analyst is using pandas to clean a DataFrame that contains missing values in the 'age' and 'income' columns. Which THREE pandas methods are appropriate for handling missing data? (Select THREE).
205An analyst needs to identify outliers in a numeric column 'transaction_amount' using the interquartile range (IQR) method. Which TWO steps are part of this process? (Select TWO).
206A data analyst uses a Common Table Expression (CTE) to query hierarchical employee data (manager_id references employee_id). Which THREE statements about recursive CTEs are correct? (Select THREE).
207A data analyst needs to retrieve the top 5 most expensive products from a 'products' table sorted by price descending. Which TWO SQL clauses are required to achieve this? (Select TWO).
208An analyst wants to use Python (pandas) to compute the average sales amount per region from a DataFrame 'df' with columns 'region' and 'sales'. Which TWO pandas operations are needed? (Select TWO).
Deep-dive questions
The most-searched questions in this domain — detailed explanations, worked examples, full answer breakdowns.
The Data Acquisition and Preparation domain covers the key concepts tested in this area of the DA0-002 exam blueprint published by CompTIA. Courseiva provides free domain-focused practice, mock exams, missed-question review, and readiness tracking across all DA0-002 domains — no account required.
The Courseiva DA0-002 question bank contains 208 questions in the Data Acquisition and Preparation domain, covering the 22% of the exam attributed to this domain in the official CompTIA blueprint. Click any question to see the full explanation and answer breakdown.
Start with a 10-question focused session to identify your baseline accuracy in this domain. Read every explanation — even for questions you answer correctly — to understand the reasoning. Once you score consistently above 80%, move to a 20–30 question session to confirm depth before moving to the next domain.
Yes — the session launcher on this page draws questions exclusively from the Data Acquisition and Preparation domain. Choose 10, 20, 30, or 50 questions for a focused session, or click individual questions to review them one by one.
Save your results, see per-domain analytics, and get readiness scores — free, for every certification.
Sign Up FreeFree forever · Every certification included