At this year’s Open Source Bridge in Portland last month, Eric Redmond presented ‘A Dozen Databases in 45 minutes’. It’s really about 20 minutes of theory and 25 minutes of the dozen databases, so for this first of a 2-part series, we present the theoretical side of things.
ACID – atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability
BASE– basically available, soft state, eventual consistency (there’s also a good article by Lewis Cunningham that explains ACID vs. BASE in the context of cloud computing.