There are many approaches to data consistency, including for example Eventual consistency, not only in databases but in any parallel programming. Different CPU

There are many approaches to data consistency, including for example Eventual consistency, not only in databases but in any parallel programming. Different CPU architectures for example for years provided different memory consistency models with trade-offs of performance and being usable for application programmers. It is important however behavior in this case is clearly documented. I think there is decent documentation about Innodb describing how transactions work in Innodb http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/innodb-transaction-model.html http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/innodb-transaction-mo... Galera would benefit having more clear documentation about what data consistency model exactly it provides. At the same time Percona XtraDB Cluster, MariaDB Cluster can be used to built reliable applications assuming you're writing to their consistency model correctly.