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Showing posts from February 14, 2010

Brewers CAP Theorem on distributed systems

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Large distributed systems run into a problem which smaller systems don’t usually have to worry about. “ Brewers CAP Theorem ” [ Ref 1 ] [ Ref 2 ] [ Ref 3 ]  defines this problem in a very simple way. It states, that though its desirable to have Consistency, High-Availability and Partition-tolerance in every system, unfortunately no system can achieve all three at the same time . C onsistent : A fully Consistent system is one where the system can guarantee that once you store a state (lets say “x=y”) in the system, it will report the same state in every subsequent operation until the state is explicitly changed by something outside the system. [ Example 1 ] A single MySQL database instance is automatically fully consistent since there is only one node keeping the state. [ Example 2 ] If two MySQL servers are involved, and if the system is designed in such a way that all keys starting “a” to “m” is kept on server 1, and keys “n” to “z” are kept on server