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Code RoomCDC to lakehouse pipeline
HardPrep Room Coding #3538

CDC to lakehouse pipeline

System designDistributed systemsSenior–Staff~45 min

Design a CDC pipeline that streams changes from ~40 OLTP Postgres microservice databases (combined ~6 TB, ~8k writes/sec) into a lakehouse (Iceberg/Delta tables on object storage), keeping each lakehouse table an up-to-date mirror queryable by Trino/Spark within ~2 minutes of the source write. Source teams ship schema changes weekly (add/rename/drop columns, type widening) without coordinating with the data platform. The lakehouse must reflect inserts, updates, and deletes, and historical queries must still work after a column is renamed upstream.

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.

Clarify5:00 left
Estimate5:00 planned
Design15:00 planned
Deep dive12:00 planned
Failure8:00 planned
0:00
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