Paper
2002
Brewer's Conjecture and the Feasibility of Consistent, Available, Partition-Tolerant Web Services
Seth Gilbert & Nancy Lynch
Proves Brewer's conjecture formally: under network partition a system must give up either consistency or availability.
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Groundwork for
Works in the library that name this one as a prerequisite.
- CAP Twelve Years Later: How the "Rules" Have ChangedEric Brewer, 2012Revisits his own 2000 conjecture to argue the three-way choice was oversimplified: real partitions are rare and short, so systems mostly negotiate a spectrum between consistency and availability rather than picking a corner outright.
- A Critique of the CAP TheoremMartin Kleppmann, 2015Argues CAP's definitions of consistency and availability are too narrow to guide real design decisions, and that the theorem is routinely invoked to justify choices it does not actually imply.
- Life beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's OpinionPat Helland, 2007Argues large-scale systems should abandon ACID distributed transactions in favour of idempotent operations and business-level compensation, because coordination across machines does not scale.
- Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and LimitationsPeter Bailis et al., 2013Identifies exactly which transactional guarantees are compatible with high availability, showing most applications need far less isolation than full ACID promises.
Filed under Distributed Systems in Computer Science.