# The Silent Pipeline

> Silence, mistaken for success.

Canonical URL: <https://datadriven.io/problems/expectations-suite-passes-on-empty>

Domain: ai_coding · Difficulty: medium · Seniority: L5

## Problem

Last week the upstream booking_events feed broke for 3 days, so fct_bookings emerged empty each morning. Our data-quality suite reported all expectations passing. The on-call only caught it when finance asked why the dashboard was flat. Run tests/test_quality_suite.py to reproduce. Fix the suite (in dq/expectations.py) so an empty input table fails LOUDLY instead of vacuously passing every row-level check.

## Related

- [All practice problems](https://datadriven.io/problems)
- [Mock interview mode](https://datadriven.io/interview/expectations-suite-passes-on-empty)
- [Data Engineering Interview Prep Guide](https://datadriven.io/data-engineer-interview-prep)
- [Daily Challenge](https://datadriven.io/daily)

---

Source: DataDriven (https://datadriven.io). 100% free data engineering interview prep. Live code execution against Postgres 16, Python 3.11, and Spark sandboxes. No paywall, no premium tier, no signup gate.