Thoughts on distributed databases, open source, and cloud native
Web app developers initially adopted MongoDB for its ability to model data as “schemaless” JSON documents. This was a welcome relief to many who were previously bitten by the rigid structure and schema constraints of relational databases. However, two critical concerns that have been a thorn on MongoDB’s side over the years are that of data durability and ACID transactions.
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Read MoreAs described in A Primer on ACID Transactions, first generation NoSQL databases dropped ACID guarantees with the rationale that such guarantees are needed only by old school enterprises running monolithic, relational applications in a single private datacenter. And the premise was that modern distributed apps should instead focus on linear database scalability along with low latency, mostly-accurate,
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Read MoreACID transactions were a big deal when first introduced formally in the 1980s in monolithic SQL databases such as Oracle and IBM DB2. Popular distributed NoSQL databases of the past decade including Amazon DynamoDB and Apache Cassandra initially focused on “big data” use cases that did not require such guarantees and hence avoided implementing them altogether. However, ACID transactions have made a strong comeback in the last several years with the launch of next-generation distributed databases that have built-in support for them.
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