Latest / Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp
Seat 14C, Sold Twice: Consistency Models and Isolation
Two hundred and eleven concert seats are sold twice, and the database did exactly what it promised. Episode one hundred and fifty five explains the precise promises databases and distributed systems make when many things happen at once: linearisability and serialisability, the anomalies weaker levels allow, why snapshot isolation was long sold as serialisable, how Google's Spanner uses atomic clocks to order the world, what CAP and PACELC really say, and what independent testing by Jepsen has found, including results from 2025 and 2026. A fictional on-call engineer, Priyamvada, writes the…
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