System design interview question
"Design a distributed compute system for analytics over logs. Analysts submit queries like 'count errors by service over the last 30 days' against petabytes of log data sitting in object storage. Queries should return in seconds to minutes, and hundreds of analysts share the cluster."
distributed query execution over cold storage, plus multi-tenant resource management. The distinguishing content is: why storage format dominates query performance (columnar, partitioning, predicate pushdown), how a query is decomposed across workers, and how you stop one analyst's runaway query from consuming the whole cluster.
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