Fixing ACID without going NoSQL

Daniel Abadi and Alexander Thomson:

In our opinion, the NoSQL decision to give up on ACID is the lazy solution to these scalability and replication issues. Responsibility for atomicity, consistency and isolation is simply being pushed onto the developer. What is really needed is a way for ACID systems to scale on shared-nothing architectures, and that is what we address in the research paper that we will present at VLDB this month. Our view (and yes, this may seem counterintuitive at first), is that the problem with ACID is not that its guarantees are too strong (and that therefore scaling these guarantees in a shared-nothing cluster of machines is too hard), but rather that its guarantees are too weak, and that this weakness is hindering scalability.

No comments until I think this through.

Paper available ☞ here.

Original title and link for this post: Fixing ACID without going NoSQL (published on the NoSQL blog: myNoSQL)

via: http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2010/08/problems-with-acid-and-how-to-fix-them.html