Database Selection and Trade Offs Questions

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.

MediumSystem Design

0 practiced

Design a strategy for zero-downtime schema changes across relational and document stores. Cover techniques such as expand-contract, shadow writes, dual reads, feature flags, online migrations, and how to handle backward and forward compatibility for clients during rollout.

MediumTechnical

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Design a data retention and GDPR compliance solution across heterogeneous stores: relational DB, document store, and analytics data lake. Describe how you would discover personal data, propagate deletions or pseudonymization, maintain audit trails, and reconcile delayed or out-of-order deletions across downstream systems.

MediumTechnical

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Describe how to size and estimate cost for a managed database service given: 50k reads/s, 10k writes/s, 10 TB usable storage, and 3 replicas across regions. Include compute sizing for CPU and memory, IOPS estimates, network egress, backup storage costs, autoscaling headroom, and a sensitivity analysis for 3x peak traffic.

MediumSystem Design

0 practiced

Design the data storage architecture for an e-commerce product catalog that requires: sub-100ms product page reads, flexible schema for varied attributes, strong inventory consistency during checkout, faceted search, and analytics. Propose one or more databases and describe data flows, duplication, and justification for a polyglot approach.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Describe characteristics of time-series databases such as compression, retention policies, downsampling, append-only writes, and efficient range scans. Recommend a storage solution for metrics ingest at 200k points per second with 1 year retention and a low-cost cold storage option for older data.

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