At Meta scale, a 10TB event log backing surfaces like Facebook Feed or Instagram Reels can become slow to query and expensive to maintain if it remains a single heap table. Interviewers want to see whether you can design a partitioning strategy that improves scan efficiency without making ingestion and maintenance fragile.
Explain how you would partition a 10TB events table in PostgreSQL for performance. Your answer should cover:
Keep the answer practical and PostgreSQL-specific. The interviewer is not looking for generic distributed data lake advice; they want a database design discussion grounded in partition pruning, index strategy, maintenance operations, and operational trade-offs.