Database Selection and Tradeoffs Questions

Evaluate and justify choices of persistence technologies by comparing relational databases with document and other non relational stores. Discuss schema design and evolution, the tradeoffs between structured schemas and flexible documents, transactional guarantees versus eventual consistency, indexing and query patterns, and normalization versus denormalization. Explain operational and scaling approaches such as read replicas, sharding, partitioning, backups, migrations, and monitoring. Describe integration patterns with caches and search engines and give concrete examples mapping use cases to technologies, for example using a relational database for booking transactions and a document store or search index for user generated content and free text search.