As asked
An executive dashboard takes 45 seconds to load every Monday morning. How do you make it fast and reliable?
Sample answer outline
Profile the dashboard queries first and identify whether the bottleneck is warehouse compute, BI tool rendering, filters, joins, or too many tiles refreshing at once. Pre-aggregate stable metrics into marts or summary tables, partition and cluster large fact tables, and cache results where freshness requirements allow it. Reduce unnecessary cross-filtering and dashboard-level queries that scan the same table repeatedly. Add freshness indicators so executives understand the tradeoff between live data and fast data. Candidates often only increase warehouse size, which can hide modelling problems and raise cost.
Expect these follow-ups
- Which dashboard tiles should not be live queries?
- How do you decide between materialised views and scheduled summary tables?
- What freshness SLA would you set for an executive revenue dashboard?
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