At companies like StripeShop, the same data often supports both application transactions and reporting. Interviewers ask this question to test whether you can connect schema design choices to workload patterns, query behavior, and maintenance trade-offs.
Explain how you would choose between a normalized schema and a denormalized schema for transactional workloads versus analytics workloads. In your answer, address:
The interviewer expects a practical database-design explanation, not just textbook definitions. Focus on how schema shape affects joins, aggregations, update behavior, and operational reliability in PostgreSQL-based systems.