design a system supporting massive data storage and query

Question

I was asked by the interviewer to design a system to store gigabytes of data and the system also has to support some kind of query.

Description:

Answer 1

I believe the interviewer was expecting a distributed computing based solution, esp when "100 billion records" are involved. With the limited knowledge of Distributed Computing I have, I would suggest you to look into Distributed Hash Table and map-reduce (for parallel query processing)