I'm of two minds about consistency vs banks. On the one hand, yes, in the CAP sense, "consistency" is atomic consistency, and banks allow a form of eventual con

I'm of two minds about consistency vs banks. On the one hand, yes, in the CAP sense, "consistency" is atomic consistency, and banks allow a form of eventual consistency. On the other hand, I'm not sure if the NoSQL sense of eventual consistency is strong enough for what banks need; how do NoSQL eventual-consistency models deal with conflicts that affect other tables? For instance, a quick Google shows that MongoDB offers "programmatic merge" - but would that also allow you to say "when merging my spouse's ATM transaction with mine in our checking account, also remove the spurious transaction in the bank's cash-on-hand account"? Maybe I'm thinking too close to the metal; to get eventual consistency at a higher level, you still need atomic consistency at a lower level - even Paxos uses two-phase commit under the covers. As for the partitioning, what "isn't wrong" is: - He says the CAP theorem is historically irrelevant to relational databases, which is wrong, and that they have been "adapted" to provide high availability, which is kinda wrong, and then: - He confuses "partition" in the "partition my database" sense (scale my database across multiple tables or nodes) with "partition" in the original CAP sense (do not permanently explode if a node goes offline), so he isn't even wrong - any multi-server database allows partitioning, by definition. Also, I think you're misunderstanding that item on the wiki page; it sounds like Postgres-XC IS globally consistent, but that it can't yet support some important forms of consistency like UNIQUE constraints across nodes (you can only have a unique constraint within the same node). All nodes would see the duplicate rows, though, so it is globally consistent.