Code RoomCDC snapshot-to-stream handoff
HardPrep Room Coding #3551

CDC snapshot-to-stream handoff

System designDatabases & SQLDistributed systemsSenior–Staff~40 min

You're bootstrapping CDC on a hot 3 TB Postgres table that takes ~6 hours to snapshot, while it receives ~5k writes/sec the whole time. You must produce a downstream copy that is eventually consistent with the source with NO gap and NO duplicate-induced incorrectness — but you can't lock the table for 6 hours and you can't afford to miss writes that happen during the snapshot. Design the snapshot-to-stream handoff so the consumer ends up with exactly the right final state, and explain how a mid-snapshot failure is recovered.

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.

Clarify4:30 left
Estimate4:30 planned
Design13:30 planned
Deep dive10:30 planned
Failure7:00 planned
0:00
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.