Cracking the Coding Interview-ch11 | System Design and Memory Limits - Fangzhen - 博客园

Cracking the Coding Interview-ch11 | System Design and Memory Limits - Fangzhen - 博客园

11.1     If you were integrating a feed of end of day stock price information (open, high, low, and closing price) for 5,000 companies, how would you do it? You are responsible for the development, rollout and ongoing monitoring and maintenance of the feed. Describe the different methods you considered and why you would recommend your approach. The feed is delivered once per trading day in a comma-separated format via an FTP site. The feed will be used by 1000 daily users in a web application.
SOLUTION
Let's assume we have some scripts which are scheduled to get the data via FTP at the end of the day. Where do we store the data? How do we store the data in such a way that we can do various analyses of it?
Proposal #1
Keep the data in text files. This would be very difficult to manage and update, as well as very hard to query. Keeping unorganized text files would lead to a very inefficient data model.
Proposal #2
We could use a database. This provides the following benefits:
»» Logical storage of data.
»» Facilitates an easy way of doing query processing over the data.
Example: return all stocks having open > N AND closing price < M
Advantages:
»» Makes the maintenance easy once installed properly.
»» Roll back, backing up data, and security could be provided using standard database
    features. We don't have to "reinvent the wheel."

Read full article from Cracking the Coding Interview-ch11 | System Design and Memory Limits - Fangzhen - 博客园