How to evaluate and choose data storage systems and architectures based on workload characteristics and business constraints. Coverage includes differences between relational and nonrelational families such as document stores, key value stores, wide column stores, graph databases, time series databases, and search engines; mapping query patterns and latency requirements to storage options; trade offs between strong consistency and eventual consistency and their impact on availability and complexity; partition key design, replication strategies, and high availability considerations; operational concerns including backups, monitoring, vendor and cost trade offs, migration or hybrid strategies, and when to adopt polyglot persistence. Senior level discussion includes selecting specific managed services and reasoning about expected load patterns, failure modes, and operational burden.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Explain how you would architect a highly available PostgreSQL deployment for a write-heavy OLTP workload (5k writes/s) with RPO <= 1 minute. Cover primary/standby topology, synchronous vs asynchronous replication trade-offs, failover automation tooling, monitoring alerts, and backup/point-in-time recovery strategy to meet RTO/RPO.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Architect read-write separation for a Postgres cluster serving both OLTP and analytical workloads. Requirements: 10k TPS for writes, complex analytical queries must not impact write tail latency, and eventual consistency for analytics is acceptable. Discuss replica lag, async replicas, query routing, materialized views, logical replication to analytical stores, and SLO maintenance.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Estimate the operational burden and on-call load if the team moves from a managed RDBMS to self-managed distributed NoSQL across dev, staging, and prod. Identify required runbooks, monitoring/alerting, automated repairs, upgrade processes, and recommend what to automate first to keep SRE headcount growth minimal.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
As an SRE, explain the key differences between relational (SQL) and non-relational (NoSQL) databases. Cover data model, query expressiveness, transaction guarantees (ACID vs BASE), typical latency and throughput characteristics, operational concerns (backup/restore, scaling, migrations), and give example use cases and managed-service examples for each family.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Design how you'd ensure encryption, access controls, audit logging, and data residency for a database storing PII across multiple regions. Discuss key management (KMS), role-based access, audit-log retention and integrity, performance impacts of encryption, and how you'd test and monitor compliance continuously.
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