Problem
You need to backfill terabytes of historical data into a pipeline that is already processing live events. The key challenge is keeping downstream tables correct and queryable without pausing real-time ingestion or introducing duplicates, stale overwrites, or long freshness regressions.
Key Constraints
- Historical and live data may overlap on the same business keys
- Backfill jobs can compete with streaming jobs for compute and warehouse capacity
- Late historical records must not overwrite newer real-time state incorrectly
- Downstream consumers still expect near-real-time freshness
What This Tests
- Backfilling strategy
- Stream processing design
- Idempotent writes and replay safety
- Data quality gates and reconciliation
- Orchestration of bounded and unbounded workloads
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