Code Room
System designHardsd-g027
Subject Secondary indexesLevel Senior–Staff~45 minCommon in Databases & SQL · Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design secondary indexing for a multi-tenant e-commerce order store that is primary-keyed and partitioned by (tenant_id, order_id). Merchants need to query orders by customer_email, by status, and by a date range — none of which is the partition key — across potentially millions of orders per large tenant, with p95 under 150ms. The store does ~80k order writes/sec globally. Compare global vs local secondary indexes for this access pattern, pick one (or a mix), and explain the consistency and write-cost trade-offs.

What a strong answer looks like

Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts — data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes — and name the trade-offs you are making.

Narrate your design
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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.