System design · Free PDF
System Design for Data Pipelines
Batch and streaming, queues, backfills, data quality and feature stores.
System Design for Databases
Choosing a database, indexes, replication and sharding, consistency, and where vector stores fit.
Free PDF · sent by email the day it’s ready
Who it’s for
For engineers whose design round turns on storage: what to store where, how it scales and what breaks.
Includes vector databases, which come up in most AI system designs.
What it covers
- Choosing a store
- Indexes
- Replication and sharding
- Vector databases
What the guide will include
A framework for the round
Requirements, architecture, tradeoffs, evaluation and failure modes, in the order you say them.
Worked designs
Prompts worked end to end the way you would answer them at the whiteboard, with the diagram.
Tradeoffs to name
The choices interviewers push on, and what each option costs in latency, money and risk.
Failure modes and evals
How the system breaks in production, how you would notice, and what you would measure.
A PDF you can print
Read it on your phone before the call, or print the sections you want to drill.
Planned contents
The guide isn’t out yet, so chapters and their order may still change.
- 1. How the design round runs
- 2. Choosing a store
- 3. Indexes
- 4. Replication and sharding
- 5. Vector databases
- 6. Practice prompts
Free PDF
Get the Databases PDF free
Choosing a database, indexing, replication, sharding, consistency and vector stores.
Questions about the guide
Is the PDF really free?
Yes. Leave your email and we send the PDF the day it is ready. No payment details, and every email has a one-click unsubscribe link.
Is it based on a specific company’s interviews?
No. It is written from the concepts the role or system depends on. We don’t name companies or claim to know what any one company asks.
When will it be ready?
It isn’t out yet. Leave your email and we send it the day it is; nothing else arrives before then.
Related guides
System design · Free PDF
System Design for RAG and LLM Apps
Ingestion, chunking, retrieval, reranking, grounding and evaluating answers.
System design · Free PDF
AI System Design
A framework for the design round and worked cases: support bot, document search, coding agent and more.