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Preptima

Consistency & Availability interview questions

CAP and PACELC in practice, consistency models, consensus, and what you give up under partition.

3 questions in System Design.

hard3

hardDesignConcept

Two users edit the same record while offline and both reconnect. How do you reconcile the two versions without silently losing one of the edits?

Accepting writes on both sides means conflicts are inevitable, so the design choice is who resolves them. Last-write-wins discards an edit by clock accident; version vectors detect the conflict and hand it back; CRDTs merge deterministically but only for the operations they model. Use this conflict resolution answer to show the decision, trade-off, and evidence rather than a memorised definition.

6 minmid, senior, staff