alt Hacker NewsI would say quite the opposite - most business have little need for eventual consistency and at a small scale its not even a requirement for any database you would reasonably used, way more than 90% of companies don't need eventual consistency.
I would say quite the opposite - most business have little need for eventual consistency and at a small scale its not even a requirement for any database you would reasonably used, way more than 90% of companies don't need eventual consistency.
No. The real world is full of eventual consistency, and we simply operate around it. :-)
Think about a supermarket: If the store is open 24/7, prices change constantly, and some items still have the old price tag until shelves get refreshed. The system converges over time.
Or airlines: They must overbook, because if they wait for perfect certainty, planes fly half empty. They accept inconsistency and correct later with compensation.
Even banking works this way. All database books have the usual “you can’t debit twice, so you need transactions”…bullshit. But think of a money transfer across banks and possibly across countries? Not globally atomic...
What if you transfer money to an account that was closed an hour ago in another system? The transfer doesn’t instantly fail everywhere. It’s posted as credit/debit, then reconciliation runs later, and you eventually get a reversal.
Same with stock markets: Trades happen continuously, but final clearing and settlement occur after the fact.
And technically DNS is eventual consistency by design. You update a record, but the world sees it gradually as caches expire. Yet the internet works.
Distributed systems aren’t broken when they’re eventually consistent. They’re mirroring how real systems work: commit locally, reconcile globally, compensate when needed.