Databases are organized collections of data. They provide structure for easy access to the most relevant information, allowing us to read and write our data accurately and efficiently.

Each kind of database has its trade-offs depending on how it organizes and stores data. The role of a database designer is to design a database that adapts to an organization’s specific set of needs.

Database system design is the process of optimizing a system to increase efficiency for a given set of activities. This includes choosing the type of database management system, how to organize data in tables, and where the data should be sourced from.

Database design problems aren’t necessarily limited to the design of new databases– they may also refer to changing pre-existing data management systems.

As a database system designer, your task is to evaluate the needs of an organization and modify the internal structure of databases according to the requirements of stakeholders and end users.

In an interview, database system design problems usually look something like this:

You’re creating a data pipeline that scrapes data from Wikipedia and cleans it to train an NLP model. How would you build a data pipeline and store data from HTML tags and text data into a clean dataset in the database?