🧭 Scenario · Make the call
The orders table that outgrew one machine
The situation
A delivery app keeps every order in one giant `orders` table on one database server. After a few huge years that single table holds billions of rows — so many that it no longer fits on the machine's disk, and even simple lookups crawl because the data is just too big for one box to hold and scan. The team has already added every sensible index. The table itself is the thing that's too big for one machine.
You haven't read about this exact system. That's the point — walk the three questions a designer asks: what's really wrong, what fixes it, and what does the fix cost?
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Diagnose
Read past the story. What's the REAL problem — not what the feature does, but what's actually going wrong?
Look past the story. What's the REAL problem here?