Menu
Back to Discussions

How deep should you go into database schema design during an interview?

Ahmed Liu
Ahmed Liu
·673 views
I'm getting inconsistent feedback on how deep to go into database schema design during system design interviews. Some interviewers seem satisfied with just a few high-level entities and their relationships, maybe with primary keys. Others want to see actual table schemas with columns, data types, and index considerations. It's tough to gauge the expectation in the moment. How do you decide on the right level of detail? Do you wait for the interviewer to prompt you? Or do you proactively sketch out a few critical tables with their columns and then offer to go deeper if they'd like? I'm trying to avoid spending too much time on schema if it's not what they're looking for, but also want to show I can think about data modeling thoroughly.
4 comments

Comments

Sign in to join the conversation.

Loading comments...