Hacker News Reader

I’m not convinced the author knows what they’re talking about. The answer to the question they posed is basically “ACID”, so unclear what all the verbiage is. Also unclear why they expect all readers to have an architecture featuring multiple application servers all sharing a single database, since that is neither classic monolith nor classic microservices.

View on HN

I get the same impression. Relational with ACID guarantees can't be implemented in a distributed system. Depending on which guarantees you want to give up, you might be able to get close. A lot of newer platforms give up guarantees to achieve something like this.

But if you have multiple nodes that have to sync every transaction over a dedicated NIC, well, that's not a distributed system. It's just multiprocessing with extra latency.

> Relational with ACID guarantees can't be implemented in a distributed system.

CockroachDB and YugabyteDB would like to have a word.

It's a causality problem, not a technology problem.

Information can't be changed in two places simultaneously. That latency, no matter how small, requires us to either eat the latency, give up guarantees, or alter our system's behavior in some other small way.

Of course. But thanks to raft per table, the queries are coordinated in such a way that to the observer it looks like acid.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com