(2007-07-26) Dehora Data Scaling Tradeoffs

Bill De Hora on Data Base Scalability. But I think the juice is in the promise of data consistency. Getting people to compromise the idea of consistent data and ACID semantics for something like high availability (HA) is a huge challenge. I suspect plenty of people don't realize that HA and ACID are in conflict for larger values of N and where the data is geographically distributed... OA incidently, is also committed to trading off data consistency for some other desirable characteristic, probably partitioning (in the guise of separation of business concerns) rather than HA. In SOA the consistency workarounds are called "orchestration" which sounds a lot more palatable that "application level joins".

This links via Joe Gregorio to Joe Armstrong's claim that A system that is Fault Tolerant can easily be made scalable and easily made so that we can do in-service upgrade.