Read-your-writes and monotonic reads aren’t just buzzwords. They’re the difference between a database that feels broken and one that makes sense to users.

Users see stale data after writes. It’s not a bug, it’s replication lag. Learn to handle read-after-write problems and causality violations in production.

Eventual consistency doesn’t mean milliseconds. Understand linearizability, causal consistency, and quorum reads to pick the right consistency model.