Darren New wrote:
> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1394128
> 
> Does a good job of describing how to go about breaking ACID for eventual 
> consistency and higher availability.

It seems to me that "BASE" fundamentally requires an ACID-compliant 
database. They're only talking about relaxing consistancy requirements 
in a few key areas. A completely non-ACID database wouldn't function 
properly. (E.g., if the database engine's own metadata became 
inconsistent, the database engine wouldn't be able to read the database 
any more.)

All I can say is, I hope *I* never have to deal with a database so vast 
that I have to risk having it give me gibberish from time to time just 
so that it's "fast enough".

Also...

"For constraints to be applied, the tables must reside on a single 
database server, precluding horizontal scaling as transaction rates grow."

Um... why?



Still, now Amazon's message service (whatever the hell it's called) 
makes sense.

I do feel, though, that the mechanisms described for processing work now 
and restoring consistency later by passing messages, and detecting when 
consistency has returned and so forth really ought to be part of the 
database engine rather than application code...

Post a reply to this message