I don't think either CockroachDB or Percolator is claiming any novelty for this basic approach. The Percolator article cites another paper from 1981 that discus

I don't think either CockroachDB or Percolator is claiming any novelty for this basic approach. The Percolator article cites another paper from 1981 that discusses essentially the same idea. (I think it's the same, at least -- the writing is pretty terse, and I've only skimmed it so far.) http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/cs262/concurrency-distributed-databases.pdf http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/cs262/concurrency-distrib... Many of the general principles for this kind of distributed database have been known for decades; the key to making it practical is in the details.