Your data model determines your application's scalability, query performance, and cost—and the wrong choices are painful to fix later. Additionally, estimating data growth and resource requirements is crucial for preventing surprises down the line. Designing upfront isn’t just a best practice; it’s a requirement for preventing architectural 'surprises' as you grow.

In this slide-free, live-coding session, we will work exclusively within Visual Studio Code to redesign the Stack Overflow data model from the ground up. We will tackle real-world implementation details, including:

- Partition Key Strategies: Understanding single key versus hierarchical partition keys and the appropriate scenarios for each.
- Schema Design Trade-offs: The practical reality of embedding vs. referencing and denormalization.
- Modern Search: Implementing vector and free-text search in a live environment.
- Capacity Planning: Practical methods for estimating storage and capacity requirements.