Confluent Interview Questions

Alfred O. - "We can use dictionary to store cache items so that our read / write operations will be O(1). Each time we read or update an existing record, we have to ensure the item is moved to the back of the cache. This will allow us to evict the first item in the cache whenever the cache is full and we need to add new records also making our eviction O(1) Instead of normal dictionary, we will use ordered dictionary to store cache items. This will allow us to efficiently move items to back of the cache a"See full answer

Glados - "First, why are we building the system? What are the requirements we must meet - Do customers care about data being read/written from a single set of tables or multiple tables, do they care about cost allocation, do they need backups/storage to happen slow or fast, do they foresee a lot of data movement from one table to another? Based on this, there are a few options using some common design choices. Shared disk, or Shared nothing. Both have pros and cons. Based on latency, performance, and cos"See full answer

Prashanth A. - "We are asked to calculate Sum(over value) for time in (t - window_size, t) where key in (key criteria). To develop a function to set this up. Let w be the window size. I would have an observer of some kind note the key-value, and for the first w windows just add the value to a temporary variable in memory if the key meets the key criteria. Then it would delete the oldest value and add the new value if the new key meets the criteria. At each step after "w", we would take the sum / w and store"See full answer

Aelaf G. - "This depends on the list of documents and the length of the documents. My implementation will use Trie with node containing the following: class TrieNode { is_end: boolean, instances: { docid → [wordpositions] }, children: array[26] } Look up for a word will give result instances{docid:wordposition...} dictionary (which can be further improved by methods like max instance on a document....you name it...) Trie space is proportional to the total characters in"See full answer