Brewer’s CAP Theorem.pdf

At the Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing in the year 2000, Eric Brewer held a keynote talk about his experience with the recent changes in the development of distributed databases. (Brewer, Towards Robust Distributed System, 2000) In the years before his talk, the size of data grew immensely, making it necessary to find more scalable solutions than the so far existing ACID-databases. As a result new principles were developed, summed up under the BASE-paradigm (basically available, soft-state, eventual consistency). Brewer analyzed the consequences of this paradigm change and its implications, resulting in the CAP- Theorem which he presented in his talk – at this point more a personal intuition than an actual proven fact. However, the theorem had such a huge impact that many researchers picked up the subject, and two years later the theorem had been proven formally. Over the years, the CAP theorem and has been constantly developed and slight adjustments have been made, most prominently by Brewer himself who amended in a later paper that some of the conclusions, while not wrong, could be misleading (Brewer, CAP twelve years later: How the "rules" have changed, 2012). However, the CAP-theorem still is one of the most important findings for distributed databases.