YugabyteDB is a CP database designed to support two interfaces: YSQL for SQL workloads and YCQL for Cassandra-like workloads, with YCQL being the primary focus of this article. The database supports consistent reads by default and offers alternative types of reads, including follower reads that distribute read workload across all replicas hosting data and observer reads that use a separate cluster for read replicas, allowing for low latency access to far-off users and tuning analytics workloads. With YugabyteDB, applications can set the consistency level to ONE to get either follower or observer reads, ensuring timeline-consistency and controlling staleness with the `max_stale_read_bound_time_ms` GFlag. The database also provides fault tolerance through its RAFT group, which can tolerate k failures by having 2k+1 replicas, and follows different semantics when switching from observer reads to follower reads.