From the paper you link: "A history is serializable if it is equivalent to one in which transactions appear to execute sequentially, i.e., without interleaving

From the paper you link: "A history is serializable if it is equivalent to one in which transactions appear to execute sequentially, i.e., without interleaving... A history is strictly serializable if the transactions’ order in the sequential history is compatible with their precedence order... Linearizability can be viewed as a special case of strict serializability where transactions are restricted to consist of a single operation applied to a single object." In these terms, FoundationDB has the strict serializability property, and thus if you do exactly one operation in each FoundationDB transaction then that is linearizable. But that kind of linearizability is much less powerful than what FoundationDB actually gives you. You cannot efficiently maintain global invariants, like indexes, with single-operational linearizability. I don't think this definition is very useful! I think strict serializability (which is to say serializability & external consistency) is what you actually want. A linearizable CAS register can be implemented in FDB as simply as this: @fdb.transactional def compare_and_set( tr, key, vold, vnew ): if tr[key] == vold: tr[key] = vnew but this is not the limit of what you can do.