The system design interviewer wanted to know how I would shard a distributed database for data that included "all the data" for "all the businesses in the world" with the intent of creating an app that would provide this information about any businesses within one mile of a specific location. The question started out about how to design this system, but the interviewer in the end didn't want to know about replication or security or any "system level" information, just how I would shard the distributed data.
