Data Management Strategies: ACM Queue - BASE: An ACID Alternative: In partitioned databases, trading some consistency for availability can lead to dramatic improvements in scalability.

Reminder -- if you're interested in data management topics, check out Burton Group's Data Management Strategies blog; I'm blogging there on data mgmt topics (along with my DMS colleagues)

It's a clever acronym, at the very least :)  Read the full article for more details.

If ACID provides the consistency choice for partitioned databases, then how do you achieve availability instead? One answer is BASE (basically available, soft state, eventually consistent).

BASE is diametrically opposed to ACID. Where ACID is pessimistic and forces consistency at the end of every operation, BASE is optimistic and accepts that the database consistency will be in a state of flux. Although this sounds impossible to cope with, in reality it is quite manageable and leads to levels of scalability that cannot be obtained with ACID.

Data Management Strategies: ACM Queue - BASE: An ACID Alternative: In partitioned databases, trading some consistency for availability can lead to dramatic improvements in scalability.