I think CAP is really more about how much consistency and availablity you need. This FAQ talks about "relaxing" and that's the right word. Some systems tolerat

I think CAP is really more about how much consistency and availablity you need. This FAQ talks about "relaxing" and that's the right word. Some systems tolerate that a database (for example) is unavailable for a couple of seconds. Some don't. When you add a value into a distributed database, how much time are you ready to wait for replicas to propagate? In some cases it's fine to wait several minutes (think DNS) in some other it can have catastrophic results (think finance/banking use cases).