One of my Google interviewers asked me to implement the AdWords analysis backend from scratch: an online, high volume (high enough to need to partition the data

One of my Google interviewers asked me to implement the AdWords analysis backend from scratch: an online, high volume (high enough to need to partition the data across some kind of distributed storage) streaming dataset with a query load that the interviewer refused to define, even when pushed. I was a bit non-plussed at that one. Still don’t know what he was really trying to get at.