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Eventual Consistency is a feature, not a limitation of Riak (and friends).

It requires you to think about your application different, but it enables things that you could not do before.

For example, you can now handle databases in multiple datacenters, reducing latency to the client.

Uhm..... no.

This is backwards. Multi-DC capability is a feature. Eventual Consistency is an explicit tradeoff in a desired characteristic (Consistency) to allow other features.

well, yes and no. When you violate Consistency in SQL, your write fails. If it's a rare race condition, then the error probably just bubbles up through your application as an exception. Perhaps, if resolving conflicts was not something that we avoided but something that we baked into our application design, then we would be more likely to write code that handled it gracefully.

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