Eventual Consistent Databases: State of the Art

Abstract

One of the challenges of cloud programming is to achieve the right balance between the availability and consistency in a distributed database. Cloud computing environments, particularly cloud databases, are rapidly increasing in importance, acceptance and usage in major applications, which need the partition-tolerance and availability for scalability purposes, but sacrifice the consistency side (CAP theorem). In these environments, the data accessed by users is stored in a highly available storage system, thus the use of paradigms such as eventual consistency became more widespread. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art database systems using eventual consistency from both industry and research. Based on this review, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of eventual consistency, and identify the future research challenges on the databases using eventual consistency.