Sorry, I didn't get it. What was the 'right' answer?

Apparently some combo of kissing the arse and reading the mind of the interviewer...

It depends on the situation.

Sometimes you just have a bad interviewer who is looking for something specific from you but isn't telling you. If you're experienced in these interviews, you catch the signs and adapt by asking questions to suss out which direction the interviewer wants to take it.

Sometimes your answer is plausible but the interviewer wants to see you justify it. Sometimes your answer is wrong but the interviewer wants to see if you can reason your way through it, and maybe come up with an alternative.

If you're junior/inexperienced, it's often hard to tell and it'll feel arbitrary/unfair, and unfortunately that's just how it goes. As a more senior/experienced candidate, you can often figure out which situation you're in by asking questions to feel out the interviewer and then try to pivot during the interview, though it still takes valuable minutes out of the interview that you could have otherwise spent showing your competence.

"Postgres, because..."

They want a conversation to see how you think, not an actual answer.

Which is stupid, because they asked a question that the person didn't need to think to answer. So they didn't get to see them think.

distributed virtual abstract factory

nosql on serverless