
 Comments on “Urban Myths about NoSQL” - wglb
http://danweinreb.org/blog/657
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lemming
You _cannot_ sacrifice partition tolerance. See a much more eloquently argued
blog post than I could come up with by the ever excellent Coda Hale:
<http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance>. In fact, re-
reading it now I realise it was originally a rebuttal to Stonebraker in a
different article.

It's really common sense if you think about it. You cannot ever _guarantee_
that any system with more than one node will not suffer a partition. You need
a network between them, and your dog might chew it at any time. When ( _not
if_ ) that happens, what will your AC system do? It will either not be
available, or it will not be consistent. It's impossible to have both.

I'd be interested to know what happens in VoltDB if I have two machines in a
cluster and I pull the plug between them. Does anyone know?

Edit: more great stuff from the also ever excellent Henry Robinson:
[http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2010/04/cap-confusion-
problems-...](http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2010/04/cap-confusion-problems-
with-partition-tolerance). Good links at the bottom, too.

Second edit: removed unnecessarily inflammatory first sentence.

