[woko]

Basically, you are presented with a small-scale (possibly toy) problem: the database consists of 50k entries and fits in 3 MB of disk space.

Then the interviewee starts wondering out loud whether he could load it in full on a machine with 8 GB of RAM.

[fragmede]

Yeah. Or they veer off and discuss setting up Redshift and designs a whole ETL pipeline and data warehousing solution and a Hadoop cluster when a local file and sqlite is much more appropriate.