source: https://rethinkdb.com/docs/consistency/
However, certain operations on a single key, like incrementing a counter, are atomic.
Or y'know, you just don't do them correctly and accept a substantial rate of quietly corrupted data.
There isn't really a good option unless you have absurd amounts of money compared to your transaction volume.
Very, very painful problems are very, very valuable.
Google falls under the "absurd amount of money" camp.
> Protocol Buffers have performance implications for query processing. First, we always have to fetch entire Protocol Buffer columns from Spanner, even when we are only interested in a small subset of fields.
There are a number of performance costs documented in the paper. Simply because you can solve it via money doesn't mean it works for all situations.