Interview Bank

How to reason about it · think before answering

1. The hinge is that 'isolation' is plural. Plenty of candidates answer only data isolation, but the layer that actually breaks in production is resources: one tenant's spike starves everyone else, no rows leak, and users still complain. Open with all three — data, resources, billing — and note that each missing layer maps to its own class of incident.
2. On data, one sentence separates people who shipped this from people who read about it: 'every query carries tenant_id' versus 'row-level security is the backstop'. The first eventually misses a query, and the one it misses is always the newest, least-tested feature. The correct framing is that RLS is the gate and the application-level where clause is just an optimisation — the same reasoning as idempotency being adjudicated by a database unique constraint. Whatever the data layer can enforce should not depend on everyone remembering.
3. On resources, give two concrete things: a rate-limit bucket per tenant, and workers sharded by a hash of the tenant id. That is the same sharding mechanism used to preserve per-user ordering, with a different hash input and a different purpose — containing spikes rather than serialising. Noisy neighbours hurt more in agent workloads because a single execution can run thirty seconds, so a thousand queued items from one tenant leaves everyone else waiting.
4. Billing is the simplest and the most often forgotten: add a tenant column to the token usage ledger and tag every write. Invoicing, quotas and over-budget degradation all hang off it. Bring the cost figures too — roughly $0.0006 per turn at 2000 in and 500 out, about $900 a month at 10k daily actives and five turns each — because quoting per-tenant economics shows you actually ran the numbers.
5. Then the escalation criteria, the second discriminator. Three tiers: shared table with a tenant column, schema per tenant, database per tenant. The trigger is not tenant count, it is whether a single tenant can starve the rest and whether there is a hard compliance requirement. 'Split the database past a hundred tenants' is guesswork: a hundred small tenants share a table happily, while one regulated enterprise customer may require physical separation on its own. State the cost too — a database per tenant looks clean, but migrations, backups, monitoring and connection pools all multiply by tenant count, so operational cost jumps rather than scaling linearly.
6. Expect the sharpest follow-up: does the idempotency key change under multi-tenancy? The algorithm does not, but its scope must include the tenant id. Without it, two tenants whose clients independently produce the same string — both using order id order-1024 — collide, and the later request is rejected by the unique constraint as a duplicate. One tenant's write is swallowed by another tenant's history, both logs look perfectly normal, and it is the hardest class of multi-tenant bug to find.

分析过程 · 先想清楚再作答

1. 这题的题眼在「隔离」是复数。只答数据隔离的候选人非常多，而多租户翻车最多的其实是资源那一层——一个租户的洪峰打穿别人的处理能力，数据一条都没串，用户照样投诉。所以第一句先把三层摆出来：数据、资源、计费，缺哪一层对应一类事故。
2. 数据这一层，判断一个人有没有真做过就看一句话：他说「每条查询都带 tenant_id」还是「靠数据库的行级安全兜底」。前者迟早会漏一处，而漏掉的那处通常是最新加、最没被测过的功能。正确说法是行级安全是闸门，应用层那句 where 只是优化——这和幂等的最终裁判必须是数据库唯一约束，是同一种思路：能在数据层强制的，不要指望每个人写代码时都记得。
3. 资源这一层给两件具体的东西：每个租户一个独立限流桶，以及 worker 按租户标识哈希分片。分片这一招和「按用户哈希保住同一用户顺序」是同一套机制，只是哈希的输入换了，目的从保序变成隔离洪峰。Agent 场景里噪声邻居格外突出，因为单次执行可能跑三十秒，一个租户灌一千条进来，别人就得排队。
4. 计费这一层最简单也最容易漏：token 用量台账加一列租户标识，写入时打标。账单、配额、超支降级三件事全靠它。顺带说一句成本口径——单轮 2000 输入加 500 输出约 0.0006 美元，日活 1 万人均 5 轮约每月 900 美元，能报出这个量级说明你真的算过每租户成本。
5. 然后回答升级判据，这是本题的第二个区分点。三档是共享表加租户列、schema 级、库级；**判据不是租户数量，是「有没有单个租户能把别人拖垮」和「有没有合规硬要求」**。答「超过一百个租户就该分库」是典型的凭感觉，因为一百个小租户共享一张表毫无问题，而一个受监管的大客户哪怕只有一个也可能必须物理隔离。代价要一起说：库级隔离看着干净，但迁移脚本、备份、监控、连接池全部乘以租户数，运维成本是陡增不是线性。
6. 可以预期的追问，也是最见功力的一问：幂等键在多租户下要不要变？答案是键的算法不用变，但**作用域必须带上租户标识**。不带的话两个租户的客户端各自生成了同一个字符串（都用订单号 order-1024），后来那个会被唯一约束当成重复请求挡掉——一个租户的写入被另一个租户的历史请求吞掉，两边日志都完全正常，是多租户里最难查的一类 bug。

How to reason about it · think before answering

1. This checks whether you think about RAG as a system. 'Because it's insecure' scores nothing; the interviewer wants what specifically leaks, and what else goes wrong besides the leak.
2. Anchor the position with an image: the archivist spreads every file on the table, you pick nine, and only then does he pull three back saying you may not read those. You have already seen the titles. Filtering at generation time is that gesture.
3. Then split the consequences, and note the second one is what shows engineering experience. First, exposure: the unauthorized documents were retrieved, ranked, read into process memory, and almost certainly written to retrieval logs and traces, even if none of their text reaches the answer. Second, dilution: you take the top 8, three are off-limits, the user gets five, and the legitimate results ranked ninth and tenth never get promoted. The user experiences 'it can't find anything' while your logs show a perfectly normal retrieval.
4. State the fix: put the permission predicate in the same query as the ordering and the LIMIT, so the database prunes rows before ranking and unauthorized vectors are never compared. Cover both shapes: row-level filtering is one index plus a predicate; index isolation is a separate index per boundary.
5. Give the selection criterion: the number and stability of the isolation boundaries. A handful of departments that rarely change makes isolation worthwhile; tens of thousands of per-user private document sets leave you with row-level filtering, because that many indexes is unmanageable. Add the shared-index side effect: a large tenant degrades everyone else's retrieval quality because candidate slots are shared.
6. Expected follow-up: what about caching? It is the same bug's second crime scene. The answer cache key must include the permission scope, or one user's answer will be served to another, and that leak leaves no trace in the retrieval log at all.

分析过程 · 先想清楚再作答

1. 这题在考你有没有真的把 RAG 当系统看。答成「因为不安全」拿不到分，面试官要的是「具体泄露了什么」和「除了泄露还有什么后果」两件事。
2. 先用一个画面把位置说清楚：档案管理员先把全部档案摊在桌上让你挑，你挑完他再抽走三份说这些不能看——你已经看见标题了。在生成阶段过滤就是这个动作。
3. 然后拆后果，两条，第二条更能显出做过工程：一是**泄露面**，越权文档已经进过检索、参与过排序、被进程读进过内存、大概率写进了检索日志和链路追踪，哪怕最终答案里没有它的内容；二是**结果被稀释**，取前 8 条里有 3 条不该看，筛掉只剩 5 条，而本该补位的第 9、10 名合法结果永远没机会上来——用户体感是「查不到」，你的日志里却是一次正常检索。
4. 给正确做法：把权限谓词和排序、LIMIT 写进同一条查询，数据库先裁行再排序取前 k，越权的行一次都没被比较过。两种落法要都讲：行级过滤是一份索引加一个谓词，索引隔离是按边界各建各的索引。
5. 选型判据要给出来：看隔离边界的数量和稳定性。部门这种个位数且几乎不变的边界，隔离划算；几万个用户各自的私有文档就只能行级过滤，否则运维扛不住。补一句共用索引的副作用——数据量大的租户会拖慢别人的检索质量，因为候选名额是共享的。
6. 可预期的追问：缓存怎么办？这是同一个问题的第二现场——答案缓存的 key 里必须带上权限范围，否则一个用户的答案会被另一个用户命中，而且这条泄露路径连检索日志都不会留下痕迹。