Assess learners' ability to evaluate design trade-offs among consistency, availability, and partition tolerance (CAP theorem) when architecting global-scale distributed database systems. Present scenarios that require choosing consistency models (strong, eventual, causal), replication and sharding strategies, and consensus/quorum mechanisms; analyze failure modes, latency and throughput implications, SLA and business requirement alignment, and constraints like network partitions, regulatory data locality, and multi-region deployments. Require justification of design choices, risk mitigation strategies, and recommendations for operational monitoring and recovery under real-world constraints.