Assess learners' ability to evaluate trade-offs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance in distributed databases under real-world workloads. Scope includes CAP theorem fundamentals; consistency models (strong, eventual, causal); workload characteristics (read/write mix, latency sensitivity, skew, scale); partition and failure scenarios; key metrics (availability, latency percentiles, throughput, staleness, error rates); and practical configuration choices (replication, consensus algorithms, quorum sizing, retry/backoff, degradation strategies). Questions require analyzing provided workload/metric profiles, proposing database/configuration options, and justifying decisions by evaluating trade-offs against SLA and operational constraints.