# A daily orders pipeline runs as five bash scripts wired together by cron at 1:00am, 2:00am, 3:00am, Canonical URL: Domain: Pipeline Design ยท Difficulty: medium ## Problem A daily orders pipeline runs as five bash scripts wired together by cron at 1:00am, 2:00am, 3:00am, 4:00am, and 5:00am. Each script implicitly assumes the previous one finished. The extract usually takes thirty minutes but sometimes runs ninety; on those nights the 2:00am clean job starts on time, sees no new output, and finishes successfully on stale data, so the morning dashboard shows numbers that look complete but are wrong. This section asks you to spot the failure, not fix it. Add ONE marker node to the canvas whose name calls out the broken boundary between the two specific cron-scheduled scripts where the silent stale-read first appears, and names the symptom (silent stale read, not a visible error). Do not add an orchestrator yet. ## Related - [All practice problems](https://datadriven.io/problems) - [Mock interview mode](https://datadriven.io/interview/a-daily-orders-pipeline-runs-as-five-bash-scripts-wired-toge-cbd23b6a) - [System Design Interview Questions](https://datadriven.io/data-engineering-system-design) - [Data Engineering Interview Prep Guide](https://datadriven.io/data-engineer-interview-prep) - [Daily Challenge](https://datadriven.io/daily) --- Source: DataDriven (https://datadriven.io). 100% free data engineering interview prep. Live code execution against Postgres 16, Python 3.11, and Spark sandboxes. No paywall, no premium tier, no signup gate.