The “CAP theorem” is often presented as something deep and hard to understand, and then discussed in confusing terms, to make sure it is hard to understand.  Really, it’s almost common sense – eg, if you have a partition, you have to give up availability or consistency.  Anyone familiar with, eg, drbd/split-brain/STONITH knows all about this.

I was reading a bit about it (again), and I use the sneer quotes on “theorem” because I think that the “proof” is really just adding some mathematical terms to the mix and restating it – QED.  (If this is considered the proof – “Brewer’s Conjecture and the Feasibility of Consistent, Available, Partition-Tolerant Web Services” .)  “Conjecture” doesn’t seem right either.  Maybe CAP observation?

It’s refreshing to …

Wikipedia says that “Relational calculus is essentially equivalent to first-order logic, and indeed, Codd’s Theorem had been known to logicians since the late 1940s.”  I couldn’t find the cited sources online, but did find these interesting papers:

“Applications of Alfred Tarski’s Ideas in Database Theory”

and

“Tarski’s influence on computer science.” (see the section starting “The final thing I want to tell something about is the connection of Tarski’s ideas and work with database theory.”)

If you’ve studied mathematical logic (or math, eg, topology), you are probably familiar with Tarski’s name.  The historical …

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Recently there has been a lot of discussion on fundamental scalability of traditional relational database systems. Many of the blog posts on this topic give a great overview of some of the immediate issues faced by engineers while scaling relational databases, but don’t dissect the problem in a systematic way and with sufficient depth to get to the core issues. I’d like to dedicate a series of blog …