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Database Design and Architecture Questions

Designing and architecting databases for production and cloud environments with attention to data modeling, schema design, and access pattern optimization. Topics include normalization and denormalization trade offs, schema versus query driven modeling, entity and relationship design for transactional and analytical workloads, indexing and query optimization techniques, partitioning and sharding design decisions, schema evolution and migration strategies, materialized views and caching strategies, selection of storage layers for different data shapes, and practical operational runbooks for provisioning, monitoring, alerting, backups, disaster recovery, and capacity planning. Candidates should justify schema and architecture choices with respect to latency, throughput, development and operational complexity, maintainability, and cost.

MediumTechnical
73 practiced
A customer-facing analytics page needs sub-second response times, but the underlying query joins several large tables and only needs to be accurate within five minutes. How would you decide between materialized views, query caching, read replicas, or precomputed tables?
MediumTechnical
103 practiced
Suppose your team is building an order-processing service with customer lookups, order history pages, and admin reporting as the top queries. How would you guide the team in designing the core tables, relationships, and indexes so the schema fits those access patterns without overcomplicating writes?
HardSystem Design
75 practiced
Design the database architecture for a SaaS product that has a transactional API, a read-heavy customer dashboard, and a nightly analytics pipeline. What storage layers or database types would you choose for each workload, and how would you keep data synchronized and costs under control?
HardTechnical
140 practiced
You're inheriting a production database that has no clear runbooks, inconsistent backups, and unclear recovery expectations. What operational checks, alerts, and disaster-recovery procedures would you put in place first, and how would you prioritize them over the next quarter?
MediumTechnical
107 practiced
A critical query that used to return in 150 ms is now taking 10 seconds after a release. How would you diagnose whether the issue is a missing index, a bad query plan, stale statistics, or a schema change? What would you do first to reduce impact while you investigate?

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