Acing the System Design Interview

10 Design a database batch auditing service

This chapter covers

• Auditing database tables to find invalid data
• Designing a scalable and accurate solution to audit database tables
• Exploring possible features to answer an unusual question

Let’s design a shared service for manually defined validations. This is an unusually open-ended system design interview question, even by the usual standards of system design interviews, and the approach discussed in this chapter is just one of many possibilities.

We begin this chapter by introducing the concept of data quality. There are many definitions of data quality. In general, data quality can refer to how suitable a dataset is to serve its purpose and may also refer to activities that improve the dataset’s ...