Design a REST GET API to fetch DB records
Company: Reinforce Labs
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Take-home Project
Design a RESTful endpoint that uses **HTTP GET** to retrieve information from a database.
Scenario:
- You have a `products` table in a relational database.
- Clients need to fetch either:
1) a single product by ID, and/or
2) a list of products with filtering and pagination.
**Task:** Specify the API design and the server-side behavior, including:
- Endpoint paths and query parameters
- Request/response JSON shape
- Status codes and error handling
- Pagination strategy
- Basic performance considerations (indexes/caching)
- Security considerations (authn/authz, rate limiting)
Keep the design practical for production use.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's competency in RESTful API design, HTTP semantics, database querying and schema considerations, pagination and filtering strategies, error handling and status codes, performance optimization (indexes/caching), and security aspects such as authentication, authorization, and rate limiting.