Database / Milvus Vector database Interview questions
What are Milvus's consistency levels?
Milvus offers four tunable consistency levels, letting an application trade off read freshness against latency and throughput on a per-query basis rather than being locked into one fixed guarantee for the whole system.
| Level | Guarantee |
| Strong | Reads always see the absolute latest committed writes. |
| Bounded Staleness | Reads may lag behind the latest writes, but only within a configured time window. |
| Session | A single client session always sees its own writes, though other clients' very latest writes aren't guaranteed visible. |
| Eventually | No specific ordering or freshness guarantee; the fastest and most scalable option. |
Under the hood, every operation gets a timestamp from Milvus's Timestamp Oracle, and search requests specify a guarantee timestamp that Query Nodes use to determine which data is safe to include in the result, which is the mechanism that actually implements this configurable trade-off between freshness and performance.
Which consistency level guarantees reads always see the absolute latest committed writes?
Bounded Staleness consistency allows reads to:
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