A Certain Tendency Of The Database Community

TL;DR

This paper argues that the pursuit of 'single system image' semantics in distributed systems is flawed and proposes a new model optimized for eventual consistency in large-scale environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel computational model tailored for systems with eventually consistent data, challenging traditional centralized paradigms.

Findings

Distributed systems should embrace eventual consistency.

A new computational model improves handling of large-scale, distributed data.

Traditional 'single system image' approaches are fundamentally flawed.

Abstract

We posit that striving for distributed systems that provide "single system image" semantics is fundamentally flawed and at odds with how systems operate in the physical world. We realize the database as an optimization of this system: a required, essential optimization in practice that facilitates central data placement and ease of access to participants in a system. We motivate a new model of computation that is designed to address the problems of computation over "eventually consistent" information in a large-scale distributed system.