Database Management Systems · Distributed systems

Consistency models

How strictly a distributed database insists every read sees the latest write, versus allowing some staleness.

Also known as: BASE, eventual consistency, strong consistency.

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• CAP theorem: You can't have perfect consistency, availability, and partition tolerance all at once, pick two.

Related topics

• Replication and sharding: Copying data across machines for redundancy versus splitting it across machines for scale.
• Distributed databases: A database whose data lives across multiple machines instead of one.