Design a low-latency Analytics System
Last updated: May 6, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a low-latency analytics system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Oracle
System Design
Software Engineer
Oracle
May 6, 2026Software Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Medium
14
5
3,680 solved
Design a low-latency analytics system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Oracle typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Systematically gather requirements and estimate capacity (QPS, storage, bandwidth)
- Design a scalable architecture with clear component responsibilities
- Make well-reasoned database and caching decisions with trade-off analysis
- Address consistency vs availability trade-offs specific to the use case
- Discuss partitioning strategy, replication, and data modeling
- Cover failure handling, monitoring, and alerting strategies
Key Topics to Cover
Security and authentication
Partitioning and sharding strategies
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
Message queues and async processing
Failure handling and fault tolerance
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
How to Approach This
- Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
- Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
- Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
- Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
- Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- The system must process and provide analytics for millions of requests per second (QPS) in real-time.
- It should support various types of analytics queries such a...
Capacity Estimation
-
Request Volume:
- Assume a peak load of 10 million requests per second (QPS).
- Each request returns an average of 1KB of data.
-
Data Volume:
- If the system processes data continuou...
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