Data Management and Api Design Questions
Designing how applications structure, expose, and consume data through APIs and backend systems. Covers API design principles for data endpoints, pagination, filtering and sorting, idempotency, versioning, rate limiting, schema design, normalization versus denormalization, consistency models, caching strategies, client side fetching patterns, and error handling. Includes considerations for data integrity across integrations, transactional boundaries, master data management, and how API decisions affect downstream consumers and performance.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Provide a step-by-step plan with SQL examples to add a nullable column to a very large production table (billions of rows) without downtime, backfill it gradually, and then enforce NOT NULL if required. Explain approaches to avoid locks, reduce IO, and verify backfill correctness.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Explain token-bucket and leaky-bucket rate limiting algorithms. As a software engineer, describe when you'd use each for API rate limiting and outline a simple per-user rate limiter design suitable for a single-node deployment.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Define transactional boundaries in the context of HTTP APIs. For an endpoint that updates records across multiple microservices, when should you start and end a transaction, and what patterns would you use to handle partial failures and rollback semantics?
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Compare offset-based pagination with cursor-based (keyset) pagination for API endpoints that return lists. Show example SQL approaches, discuss performance characteristics on large tables, and explain how to handle sorting stability, duplicate rows, and opaque continuation tokens.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You need to add new enum values to a public API response without breaking older clients that may error on unknown enums. Propose server-side and client-side strategies (e.g., using strings instead of enums, unknown token handling), API schema annotations, and a migration plan to minimize client impact.
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