A dashboard built on a watsonx.data table returns no rows for one group of users while working correctly for another, and both groups run the identical query against the same engine. What is the most likely explanation?

The correct explanation is that access policies on the catalog or table restrict what the first group is permitted to see. Governed consumption means policies are evaluated when the query runs, so the rows returned depend on who is asking. When the only variable between a working case and a failing one is the user, permissions on the catalog, schema, or table are the first thing to examine.

The undersized-engine explanation is incorrect because an undersized engine produces slow queries, queued queries, or failures with errors, not a silent, per-user empty result. Silent truncation would be a correctness defect that no engine is designed to exhibit.

The stale-cache explanation is incorrect because a stale cache would affect users of that dashboard uniformly rather than splitting cleanly along group lines, and the question states the query itself is being run against the engine.

The different-buckets explanation is incorrect because both groups are stated to use the same engine and the same query. Reaching different data would require different catalog associations, which is a topology difference the question rules out.

For the exam, remember that identical queries returning different rows to different users is the expected behaviour of a governed platform.