Data Model Design and Access Patterns Questions
Discuss how you'd design data models based on access patterns. Understand relational vs. NoSQL trade-offs. Know when to denormalize, how to handle distributed transactions, and strategies for scaling databases (sharding, partitioning). Discuss read vs. write optimization.
MediumTechnical
32 practiced
Design a hybrid system where payments require strong consistency and reporting can be eventual. Describe the transactional data model for payments, the event capture pipeline to feed a reporting store, and strategies to ensure reports are eventually consistent while not impeding payment latency.
HardTechnical
35 practiced
A popular product row becomes a hotspot with thousands of concurrent reads and updates, causing locks, contention, and degraded performance. Propose a multi-layer mitigation plan: data-model changes (sharded counters, per-region aggregates), access-pattern changes (request coalescing, batching, optimistic concurrency), and infrastructure changes (read-replicas, write routing). Analyze trade-offs and implementation complexity.
HardTechnical
32 practiced
Explain CRDTs (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types). Design a grow-only counter and a collaborative text CRDT (for example, an RGA or sequence CRDT). Compare CRDTs to Operational Transformation (OT) regarding metadata overhead, convergence guarantees, and implementation complexity in a distributed environment.
EasyTechnical
45 practiced
Explain read replicas: how they are used to scale read traffic, the difference between synchronous and asynchronous replication, and limitations such as replication lag and stale reads. Describe common read-routing strategies and how they affect perceived consistency for clients.
MediumTechnical
33 practiced
Compare storing high-cardinality time-series in wide relational tables, specialized time-series DBs (e.g., TimescaleDB, InfluxDB), and columnar/OLAP stores. Discuss ingestion rates, compression, query patterns for aggregations, downsampling, and operational cost trade-offs for each choice.
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