Thursday, January 20, 2022
11:15 AM - 11:30 AM (EST)
Principles of the CAP Theorem and a Cloud-Native Database

The CAP theorem states that it is impossible for a distributed database to simultaneously guarantee two of the following: Consistency, availability or partition tolerance. The widely accepted theorem is often used to analyze and position new databases.

In this session, we will explore the three guarantees, deliver a definition for each and outline how each might affect your distributed system. This is a rather academic talk and hopefully, we will help you understand the history of the CAP theorem and how to use this important concept to your advantage.

We will cover:

  • The challenges to ensuring consistent distributed data
  • The availability challenges for a distributed database
  • Challenges in dealing with network failures and dropped messages
  • RAFT, MVCC and other algorithms
  • And explanation of CP and CA databases and how they are used
  • How CockroachDB delivers on these key traits