The Cockroach Hour: CAP Theorem Series - Availability

The CAP Theorem states that it is impossible for a distributed database to simultaneously guarantee more than two of the following: Consistency, Availability, or Partition Tolerance. The widely accepted theorem is often used to analyze and position new databases.

In this series, we will explore the three guarantees, delivering a definition for each, and outlining how each might affect your database implementation. This is a rather academic series of talks and hopefully, we will help you understand the tradeoff for each.  

In this session, we will explore availability, which states that ”every request receives a (non-error) response, without the guarantee that it contains the most recent write”. We will cover:

• What are the availability challenges for a distributed database.
• Why is availability important and what workloads is it important for.
• What is the effect of availability potentially returning incorrect data.
• How CockroachDB delivers some key traits for availability.