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Data Acquisition and Preparation

Practise CompTIA Data+ (DA0-002) Data Acquisition and Preparation practice questions — original exam-style scenarios with answer choices, explanations, and analysis of common mistakes.

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What to know about Data Acquisition and Preparation

Data Acquisition and Preparation questions test whether you can apply the concept in context, not just recognise a definition.

How the topic appears in realistic exam-style scenarios.

Which detail in the question changes the correct answer.

How to eliminate plausible but wrong options.

How to connect the question back to the wider exam objective.

Watch out for

Common Data Acquisition and Preparation exam traps

  • Answering from memory before reading the full scenario.
  • Missing a constraint such as cost, availability, security, scope or command context.
  • Choosing a broad answer when the question asks for the most specific fix.
  • Ignoring why the wrong options are tempting.

Question index

All Data Acquisition and Preparation questions (208)

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1

An 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?

Hard
2

A 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.)

Hard
3

A 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?

Medium
4

A 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?

Hard
5

In 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?

Medium
6

A 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.)

Medium
7

An analyst needs to retrieve the year from an order_date column (datetime type). Which function should be used in SQL?

Medium
8

A 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?

Easy
9

Refer to the exhibit. What does the query return?

Medium
10

A 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?

Easy
11

Which THREE are best practices for acquiring data via web scraping? (Select exactly 3)

Hard
12

During data profiling, an analyst wants to identify the number of distinct values in a column. Which SQL function should be used?

Medium
13

A 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?

Hard
14

A marketing team wants to collect data on competitor pricing for similar products. Which data source is most appropriate?

Easy
15

An 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).

Medium
16

A 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?

Hard
17

Which TWO of the following are common methods for acquiring data from external sources?

Medium
18

An 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?

Medium
19

A data scientist is merging retail transaction data from online and in-store sources. Which THREE steps are required to ensure data consistency?

Hard
20

A 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?

Hard
21

A 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?

Medium
22

A 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?

Medium
23

A 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?

Medium
24

A 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?

Medium
25

A 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?

Medium
26

During 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?

Medium
27

Which THREE of the following are best practices when performing data extraction for a data pipeline?

Hard
28

A 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).

Medium
29

A 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?

Medium
30

Which data sampling method involves selecting every k-th element from a list after a random start?

Easy
31

A data analyst is extracting data from a relational database using SQL. Which clause is essential for limiting the rows retrieved to only those needed?

Easy
32

A 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?

Hard
33

A 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?

Hard
34

Which SQL function can be used to extract the year from a date column 'order_date'?

Easy
35

A 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.)

Medium
36

An 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).

Medium
37

You 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?

Medium
38

A data analyst is performing data profiling on a customer dataset. Which metric would best reveal the number of distinct values in the 'state' column?

Medium
39

A data analyst wants to create a temporary result set that can be referenced within a single SQL statement. Which feature should be used?

Easy
40

A 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?

Medium
41

A 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?

Medium
42

A data analyst is performing data profiling on a customer table. Which TWO of the following are key metrics to assess data quality? (Select TWO.)

Medium
43

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?

Medium
44

In 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?

Hard
45

A 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?

Medium
46

Which SQL aggregate function would an analyst use to calculate the average value of a numeric column?

Easy
47

A 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?

Hard
48

A 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?

Hard
49

An 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?

Medium
50

A data analyst uses Python's pandas library to read a CSV file into a DataFrame. Which function is used to read the file?

Easy
51

In 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?

Easy
52

A 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?

Hard
53

An 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?

Hard
54

A data analyst wants to retrieve the top 5 highest-paid employees from an 'employees' table, including ties. Which SQL clause should be used?

Medium
55

A 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?

Medium
56

A 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?

Medium
57

Which THREE are challenges in acquiring data from external sources? (Select three.)

Hard
58

A 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?

Medium
59

A 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?

Medium
60

A data analyst needs to retrieve all unique job titles from the employees table. Which SQL clause should be used with the SELECT statement?

Easy
61

A 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?

Easy
62

A data analyst wants to identify customers whose last name starts with 'Mc' from the 'customers' table. Which WHERE clause condition should be used?

Easy
63

A 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.)

Hard
64

During 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?

Hard
65

A 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?

Medium
66

In 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?

Hard
67

Refer to the exhibit. What is the most likely issue causing the unexpectedly low count?

Medium
68

A 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?

Medium
69

A financial institution needs to acquire credit transaction data from multiple sources while ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations. What is the most critical step?

Hard
70

A 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:

Easy
71

A 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?

Hard
72

A 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)

Medium
73

A 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?

Hard
74

A 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?

Easy
75

An 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?

Medium
76

A 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?

Medium
77

A 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?

Medium
78

A 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?

Easy
79

A data analyst wants to extract the year from a date column 'order_date' in a SQL database. Which function should be used?

Medium
80

Refer to the exhibit. What data quality issue is indicated?

Easy
81

In 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?

Easy
82

A 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?

Medium
83

A 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?

Hard
84

A 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?

Hard
85

A data analyst needs to retrieve all unique job titles from an employees table. Which SQL keyword should be used in the SELECT clause?

Easy
86

A 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).

Hard
87

A 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?

Easy
88

An 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?

Medium
89

A 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?

Medium
90

A data analyst is performing data profiling on a customer table. Which metric would best help identify missing values in the 'phone' column?

Easy
91

A data analyst needs to sample records from a large dataset for a quick analysis. Which TWO sampling methods are examples of probability sampling?

Easy
92

An analyst wants to identify outliers in a dataset using the IQR method. Which values are typically considered outliers?

Easy
93

In 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?

Easy
94

Match each database concept to its definition.

Medium
95

In SQL, you want to retrieve all products whose names start with 'Pro'. Which WHERE clause should you use?

Easy
96

A 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?

Easy
97

You 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?

Hard
98

An 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?

Medium
99

During 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?

Medium
100

A data analyst is using pandas to read a CSV file named 'sales.csv'. Which line of code correctly reads the file into a DataFrame?

Medium
101

A 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?

Hard
102

Which THREE data sources are suitable for web scraping? (Select three.)

Easy
103

A data pipeline log shows the above error. Which data transformation should be applied during acquisition?

Hard
104

A 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?

Medium
105

A 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?

Medium
106

A data analyst is cleaning text data in a SQL database. Which THREE string functions are commonly used to standardize and clean text? (Choose three.)

Medium
107

A 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?

Hard
108

A data analyst is performing EDA on a dataset with numerical features. Which methods are appropriate for identifying outliers? (Select TWO).

Hard
109

A 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?

Medium
110

Refer to the exhibit. An analyst sees this log during data acquisition. What action should be taken first?

Hard
111

A 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?

Easy
112

An 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?

Hard
113

A data analyst is validating a dataset acquired from an external source. Which TWO actions are appropriate for data quality assessment?

Easy
114

A 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?

Easy
115

What is the primary purpose of the HAVING clause in the query shown?

Medium
116

A data analyst needs to collect customer sentiment data from social media platforms. Which data acquisition method is most appropriate?

Easy
117

A data analyst is validating referential integrity between orders and customers tables. Which TWO of the following checks should the analyst perform?

Medium
118

Which TWO are common methods for acquiring internal data? (Choose two.)

Easy
119

A 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?

Hard
120

A data analyst needs to perform a stratified random sample of a customer database. Which TWO steps are essential for this sampling method? (Select two.)

Medium
121

A 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?

Medium
122

A 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?

Medium
123

A data analyst is conducting exploratory data analysis (EDA) on a dataset. Which TWO tasks are typically performed during EDA? (Select two.)

Medium
124

A 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?

Medium
125

A 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?

Hard
126

A data analyst needs to combine sales data from multiple regional databases with different schemas. Which process is best?

Medium
127

A company wants to collect real-time clickstream data from its website. Which acquisition method is most suitable?

Medium
128

A data analyst wants to ensure a sample proportionally represents different regions in a population. Which sampling method should be used?

Medium
129

A 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?

Medium
130

An analyst is using SQL to analyze employee data. Which THREE of the following are valid uses of the WHERE clause? (Select three.)

Hard
131

A 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?

Easy
132

Which TWO are examples of internal data sources? (Select exactly 2)

Easy
133

Refer to the exhibit. If the date column is stored as a string in 'MM/DD/YYYY' format, what will be the result?

Medium
134

A 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:

Easy
135

Refer to the exhibit. An analyst runs this query before acquiring data from a PostgreSQL database. What is the primary purpose of this query?

Easy
136

A 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?

Easy
137

During 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?

Medium
138

Drag and drop the steps to perform a data audit in the correct order.

Medium
139

A 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.)

Medium
140

A 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?

Hard
141

A data analyst is importing a CSV file that contains a mixture of numeric and text fields. What is the most common issue when importing?

Easy
142

A marketing team wants to analyze customer sentiment from social media posts. Which data acquisition method is most appropriate?

Easy
143

An 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:

Hard
144

In SQL, which string function would you use to remove leading and trailing spaces from a column named 'city'?

Easy
145

Which THREE are best practices for data profiling during acquisition? (Choose three.)

Medium
146

A data analyst is using a recursive CTE to traverse an organizational hierarchy. What is the purpose of the anchor member in the recursive CTE?

Hard
147

Match each data analysis technique to its primary purpose.

Medium
148

An 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).

Medium
149

In 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?

Hard
150

A 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?

Medium
151

An analyst is reviewing the above SQL query used to acquire data. What does this query retrieve?

Medium
152

A 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?

Medium
153

A 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?

Easy
154

A 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).

Medium
155

A data analyst uses a CTE to simplify a complex query. Which keyword is used to define a CTE?

Medium
156

An 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?

Hard
157

An 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?

Medium
158

A company is acquiring social media data via a public API. Which TWO considerations are important for ensuring ethical and legal compliance?

Medium
159

Refer to the exhibit. What is the most likely cause of the extraction failure?

Hard
160

A data analyst needs to identify duplicate customer records. Which TWO methods are commonly used? (Select two.)

Medium
161

An analyst is using a CTE to compute hierarchical data. Which TWO statements about recursive CTEs are true?

Hard
162

A 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?

Easy
163

A 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.)

Hard
164

A data team needs to extract data from a legacy system that only supports flat file exports. Which data acquisition method is most appropriate?

Easy
165

A 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?

Hard
166

A 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?

Hard
167

A 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?

Hard
168

A 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?

Easy
169

A 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?

Medium
170

A 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).

Easy
171

You 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?

Hard
172

A retail company wants to analyze customer purchase patterns to identify products frequently bought together. Which data mining technique is most appropriate?

Easy
173

A data analyst needs to retrieve only unique job titles from the 'employees' table. Which SQL keyword should be used in the SELECT clause?

Easy
174

Which TWO of the following are valid SQL clauses used to filter and sort data?

Easy
175

A data analyst is using Python pandas to perform exploratory data analysis. Which THREE methods are commonly used to assess data quality and distributions?

Hard
176

A data analyst wants to export a summary report from a DataFrame in pandas. Which THREE methods are commonly used for data export?

Easy
177

Drag and drop the steps to perform a data backup using the 3-2-1 rule in the correct order.

Medium
178

A 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?

Hard
179

A 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.)

Medium
180

A 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?

Medium
181

A 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?

Hard
182

A data analyst sees this error in the ETL logs. What is the most likely cause?

Hard
183

A 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?

Medium
184

After 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.)

Hard
185

A data analyst runs the following query: SELECT DISTINCT city FROM customers. What is the primary purpose of using the DISTINCT keyword in this query?

Easy
186

A 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?

Easy
187

A 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?

Medium
188

A data analyst needs to calculate the running total of sales for each product over time. Which window function clause is essential for this calculation?

Hard
189

An 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?

Medium
190

A 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?

Hard
191

During 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:

Medium
192

Which TWO are valid data acquisition methods? (Select two.)

Medium
193

You 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?

Easy
194

An analyst needs to compute a running total of sales for each department, ordered by date. Which window function is most appropriate?

Hard
195

A data analyst is performing data profiling on a customer table. Which metric provides the number of unique values in a column?

Medium
196

A 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?

Easy
197

A small business wants to acquire customer feedback through a short questionnaire emailed after purchase. Which data acquisition method does this represent?

Easy
198

A 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?

Hard
199

Refer 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?

Medium
200

A 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?

Hard
201

A company is merging two customer databases from different acquisitions. They need to identify duplicate records. Which data profiling technique is most effective?

Medium
202

A 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?

Medium
203

A 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?

Medium
204

A 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?

Medium
205

Based on the exhibit, what is the most likely cause of the import failure?

Hard
206

A 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).

Easy
207

An 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).

Hard
208

A 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?

Medium

Frequently asked questions

What does the Data Acquisition and Preparation domain cover on the DA0-002 exam?
Data Acquisition and Preparation questions test whether you can apply the concept in context, not just recognise a definition.
How many questions are in this domain?
This page lists all 208 Data Acquisition and Preparation questions in the DA0-002 question bank. The actual exam draws from this domain proportionally to its weighting in the official exam blueprint.
What is the best way to practise this domain?
Start with a short focused session (10 questions) to identify gaps, then work through explanations. Repeat with a longer session once the weak areas feel solid.
Can I practise only Data Acquisition and Preparation questions?
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