System designHardsd-g671

Subject Oltp to olap replicationLevel Senior–Staff~45 minCommon in Databases & SQL · Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design an OLTP-to-OLAP replication pipeline so analysts can run heavy aggregate queries (revenue by region by day, cohort retention) over a 10 TB transactional Postgres database doing 60k writes/sec, without those analytical queries degrading production OLTP latency. Freshness target is under 1 minute. How do you move data, what target store do you pick, and how do you reconcile updates and deletes?

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.

Learn the concepts

Narrate your design

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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.