Many companies' data originate from both internal and external sources. Have you faced any obstacles in the past when trying to integrate a new external data source into the existing infrastructure? If so, how did you overcome these obstacles?
Bringing external data into a company's data systems can present challenges as the data may be coming from a source using different systems and data formats. Data architects and their colleagues must ensure that the data is in a format that is readable and useful before it is stored in the company's data warehouse. Hiring managers would like to see that you have problems solving skills specific to external data integration.
"In my experience, external data integration issues have usually stemmed from differing systems that created data in a format different from that of our company data. It would be ideal if we could all have the same systems to avoid this issue, but that was cost prohibitive. Instead, I created a script that ran before the data was uploaded to our data warehouse tables. This script changed the format of the external data and ran tests to ensure that it was in a format compatible with our systems."
