skip links for text browsers skip to main | skip to sidebar DBMS Musings google_ad_section_start(name=default) Friday, April 23, 2010 Over the past few weeks, in my advanced database system implementation class I teach at Yale, I’ve been covering the CAP theorem, its implications, and various scalable NoSQL systems that would appear to be influenced in their design by the constraints of CAP. Over the course of my coverage of this topic, I am convinced that CAP falls far short of giving a complete picture of the engineering tradeoffs behind building scalable, distributed systems. My problems with CAP CAP is generally described as the following: when you build a distributed system, of three desirable properties you want in your system: consistency, availability, and tolerance of network partitions, you can only choose two. Already there is...