System designHardsd-g673

Subject Distributed transaction sagaLevel Senior–Staff~45 minCommon in Databases & SQL · Networking & APIs · Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design a saga-based booking system that reserves a flight, a hotel, and a car as a single logical trip across three vendor services with separate databases, at 2k trips/sec. Each vendor call can succeed, fail, or time out ambiguously, and vendors may be slow for seconds. Compare orchestration vs choreography, and explain how you guarantee the trip is fully booked or fully cancelled even when a compensation itself fails.

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.