The problems with ACID, and how to fix them without going NoSQL

It is a poorly kept secret that NoSQL is not really about eliminating SQL from database systems (e.g., see these links). Rather, systems such as Bigtable, HBase, Hypertable, Cassandra, Dynamo, SimpleDB (and a host of other key-value stores), PNUTS/Sherpa, etc. are mostly concerned with system scalability. It turns out to be quite difficult to scale traditional, ACID-compliant relational database systems on cheap, shared-nothing scale-out architectures, and thus these systems drop some of the ACID guarantees in order to achieve shared-nothing scalability (letting the application developer handle the increased complexity that programming over a non-ACID compliant system entails). In other words, NoSQL really means NoACID. via DBMS Musings: The problems with ACID, and how to fix them without going NoSQL.