Database Performance Tuning and Scaling Questions

Addresses database system level performance and scaling strategies and how they interact with query design. Candidates should describe approaches for identifying and resolving database level bottlenecks including slow query diagnosis using logs and profiling instrumenting metrics and establishing baselines and targets for latency and throughput. Topics include caching strategies materialized views partitioning and sharding replication and read replica architectures connection management and improving cache utilization as well as trade offs when denormalizing schema or adopting alternative data models. Candidates should be able to propose step by step remediation plans measure the impact of changes and reason about operational concerns such as index maintenance windows monitoring and capacity planning.