acid-fundamentals

Use when reasoning about the four ACID properties of database transactions — Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability — as foundational concepts beneath any transactional system: what each property formally guarantees, the difference between the property the database claims and the property the application gets (depending on isolation level, replication mode, and configuration), the relationship between ACID and BASE (the alternative model in many NoSQL systems), why 'C' is the most contested letter (database consistency vs application invariants), and the historical record (Härder & Reuter 1983, the Gray-Reuter transaction model, Gray's Turing lecture). Do NOT use for choosing isolation levels for a specific workload (use transaction-isolation), distributed-system CAP tradeoffs (use cap-theorem-tradeoffs), database query design (use query-optimization), or zero-downtime migration mechanics (use database-migration). Do NOT use for design a database schema (use data-modeling).

By jacob-balslev schedule Updated 6/4/2026