Assess learners' ability to analyze and evaluate trade-offs among scalability, consistency, and fault tolerance in distributed databases. Scope includes the CAP theorem and its practical implications, replication strategies (synchronous vs asynchronous, leader-based vs leaderless), sharding techniques (range, hash, directory), consistency models (strong, eventual, causal), and fault-tolerance mechanisms (replication, consensus protocols, partition handling). Require comparisons of designs, identification of failure scenarios, and justified architecture recommendations using latency, throughput, availability, and consistency metrics.