HAT, not CAP: towards highly available transactions

While the CAP Theorem is often interpreted to preclude the availability of transactions in a partition-prone environment, we show that highly available systems can provide useful transactional semantics, often matching those of today’s ACID databases. We propose Highly Available Transactions (HATs) that are available in the presence of partitions. HATs support many desirable ACID guarantees for arbitrary transactional sequences of read and write operations and permit low-latency operation. 1