A backend team shipped a new field on the checkout_completed event Tuesday afternoon: discount_code_

A medium Pipeline Design interview practice problem on DataDriven. Write and execute real pipeline design code with instant grading.

Domain

Pipeline Design

Difficulty

medium

Problem

A backend team shipped a new field on the checkout_completed event Tuesday afternoon: discount_code_applied. The pipeline's loader has been writing to a strict-schema target table for six months and started failing the moment the new field appeared. The section names three reactions a loader can have to an unexpected field (reject, silent drop, accept), and the canonical fix is to land the raw payload in a flexible format so the new shape does not crash the pipeline. Spot the broken loader on the canvas: replace the strict-schema warehouse loader and target with a destination that accepts the variant payload (a JSON or VARIANT column in Snowflake or BigQuery, an Avro-tagged record on a topic backed by a schema registry, or a lakehouse table format whose schema_evolution lets new columns appear without a rewrite). The downstream dashboard must read from the new destination.

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