IntermediateBehavioral/Technical
Describe a time you optimized a slow database query in production. What steps did you take and what measurable impact did it have?
Backend Developer
General

Sample Answer

I reproduced the query with EXPLAIN, added appropriate indexes, rewrote a JOIN to use EXISTS, and introduced query caching for frequent reads. After deployment, 95th-percentile latency dropped from 1.2s to 150ms and CPU usage on the DB host decreased by 30%.

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