Consistency is a feature whose importance is regularly downplayed by hawkers of NoSQL databases. I've seen firsthand what happens when a NoSQL database scales out and it's not pretty — a significant number of people end up spending a significant amount of their time trying to figure out how to maintain data integrity across failures in the system, even the kind of minor failures that are occurring every day. A lot of the time that involves going in and cleaning up data by hand. There is no general solution for this problem, and it'll be a persistent operational tax that dogs you as long as your NoSQL database stays in use.