Database Scalability and High Availability Questions

Architectural approaches and operational practices for scaling and maintaining database availability. Topics include vertical versus horizontal scaling trade offs; replication topologies, leader and follower roles, read replicas and replica lag; read write splitting and connection pooling; sharding and partitioning strategies including range based, hash based, and consistent hashing approaches; handling hot partitions and data skew; federation and multi database federation patterns; cache layers and cache invalidation; rebalancing and resharding strategies; distributed concurrency control and transactional guarantees across shards; multi region deployment strategies, cross region failover and disaster recovery; monitoring, capacity planning, automation for failover and backups, and cost optimization at scale. Candidates should be able to pick scaling approaches based on read and write patterns and explain operational complexity and trade offs introduced by distributed data.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

List and compare common cache invalidation strategies used with application-level caches and distributed caches: cache-aside, write-through, write-behind, time-to-live, and explicit invalidation. For each strategy describe benefits, consistency trade-offs, typical use-cases and one operational pitfall.

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

Architect a geo-distributed database to provide low-latency writes from users in Europe, Asia, and North America while maintaining strong consistency for critical financial operations. Explain technology choices, replication topology, clock synchronization strategies, and how to handle causal consistency and conflict resolution.

MediumSystem Design

0 practiced

System design: Design an architecture to serve product detail reads for a large e-commerce site expecting 100k reads/sec and 2k writes/sec across 3 regions. Describe database choices, replication strategy, caching, read/write splitting, consistency model, and how you will handle search or filtering on product attributes.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Explain leader-follower replication topology for relational databases. Describe the responsibilities of the leader and followers, how read replicas are used to scale reads, how replica lag arises and its effects on consistency, and common automatic and manual failover strategies.

MediumSystem Design

0 practiced

Design: You need a database deployment across 4 regions to provide low-latency reads for users in each region while writes are majority-local. Discuss active-passive vs active-active topologies, replication choices, conflict resolution, and how you would implement cross-region failover with minimal data loss.

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