High-level design rounds at Oracle typically start with almost no given requirements — you are expected to drive the requirement- gathering conversation yourself before anything gets diagrammed. Interviewers reward a structured approach: requirements first, then API design, then data model and consistency, then failure handling.
Design a high-level system for a ticket or event booking service (e.g. movie shows, events). You are expected to drive requirement gathering yourself before proposing an architecture — the interviewer will not hand you the requirements up front.
Requirements to clarify first
- What exactly is being booked — a numbered seat for a specific show, or one of N identical slots for an event — and can a single booking hold several seats?
- Roughly how many shows are on sale at once and how spiky is demand — a normal weekday, or a blockbuster opening where one show gets thousands of requests in the first minute?
- Must a seat be strictly never double-sold (hard consistency), and how long may a seat stay reserved while the user is paying before it is released?
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The full architecture, API design, data model and failure-handling discussion for these are part of the Placement-Ready PYQ Kit.
2 more system design prompts with a full architecture writeup in the full Placement-Ready PYQ Kit