Interview › Databases & Caching
What recent database or caching change have you made, and what did it improve?
Databases & Caching · Advanced level
Answer
A strong recent-change answer should describe business driver, risk controls, migration or upgrade plan, validation, rollback, and measured improvement. Redis to Valkey migration or RDS major version upgrade are good examples.
Technical explanation
The story should show ownership from problem framing through validation.
Metrics make the answer credible: p95 latency, hit ratio, error rate, cost, recovery time, or incident reduction.
Mention rollback and what you monitored during and after the change.
Hands-on example
STAR example:
Situation: Redis lifecycle and license direction required a supported Valkey path.
Task: migrate without user impact.
Action: inventory, staging Valkey, traffic replay, failover test, TTL reduction, hot-key warmup, endpoint cutover.
Result: stable p95, stable hit ratio, no incident, lower platform risk.
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More Databases & Caching interview questions
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- What database engines does RDS support?
- What is the difference between RDS and Aurora?
- What is Multi-AZ in RDS, and how does automatic failover work?
- How long does an RDS Multi-AZ failover typically take, and what triggers it?
- What is the difference between Multi-AZ and a read replica?
- When would you use a read replica, and can it become a standalone database?
- Can a read replica be in a different region, and why would you do that?