This article was written with the assistance of AI tooling for structure and syntax. The concepts, tradeoffs, and production context are based on my own engineering experience and research. #ABotWroteThis
You're building the "find nearby drivers" feature for a ride-hailing app.
At peak, you have 500,000 active drivers updating their GPS location every 5 seconds. Riders query for drivers within 2km. At scale, you're doing ~100,000 proximity queries per second.
Your naive implementation does this:
SELECT * FROM drivers
