Technology

Design a database for time travel

Your app lets users view any state of their data at any point in time (like Git for everything). Design a database architecture that supports efficient time-travel queries without 100x storage costs.

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The brief

Solve it in plain text with any AI you like, in about 10 to 20 minutes. A judge scores how you reasoned, not whether you matched an answer.

Event sourcing stores every change but queries are slow. Snapshot + event hybrid works but snapshot frequency is a tradeoff. Temporal databases exist (TimescaleDB, XTDB) but have limitations. Version control systems solve this for files but not structured data.

Constraints

Read queries at any timestamp must be < 100ms
Storage overhead must be < 3x compared to current-state-only
Must support both point-in-time and range queries
Must handle 10K+ writes per second

What a strong answer does

Query performance at historical timestamps
Storage efficiency
Write throughput impact
Operational complexity

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