In distributed data management, what term is used for a marker indicating data has been deleted and should be removed from copies across servers?

• A. Tombstone
• B. Token
• C. TTL
• D. Topology

Answer: (A)

In distributed data management, a tombstone is the marker used to indicate that data has been deleted and should be removed from copies across servers. When you delete an item, the system writes a tombstone in place of the data and propagates that marker to other replicas. This ensures that even if some replicas lag behind, they won’t resurrect the deleted data once they process the tombstone. Tombstones stay around for a grace period and are eventually garbage collected during compaction, so the deletion becomes permanent across the cluster. TTL is about automatic expiry after a set time, not a cross-replica delete marker; token relates to data partitioning across nodes, and topology describes how nodes are arranged.