Import thing to note here is that partition tolerance here means tolerance to network partitions. As in, tolerating a situation where a link between datacenters

Import thing to note here is that partition tolerance here means tolerance to network partitions. As in, tolerating a situation where a link between datacenters/racks in a datacenters goes down and the instance becomes partitioned away. Allowing the tables to be partitioned doesn't require tolerance to network partitioning. Amazon Dynamo (and various open source datastores which borrow its infrastructure- Voldemort, Dynomite, Cassandra) is a classical example of a partition tolerant datastore: rather than using two phase commit at write time (meaning writes could fail if the cohorts and the coordinator are separated) it uses vector clocks for read-time reconciliation.