Database Reference
In-Depth Information
should be able to cover rare inconsistency-induced difficulties. On these platforms,
it might be an option for the developer to sensibly treat eventual consistent reads
as if they are consistent, accepting the rare errors as being unavoidable and thus its
impact needs to be carefully managed.
On Amazon SimpleDB, the customer who requests eventual consistent reads
experiences frequent stale reads. Also, this choice does not provide other desirable
options like read-your-writes and monotonic reads. Thus the developer who uses
eventual consistent reads must take great care in application design, to code around
the potential dangers. However, in regard to no incentive in reducing latency,
observed availability, and monetary cost, there is, in fact, no compensating benefit
for the developer from choosing eventual consistent reads instead of using consistent
reads. There may be benefits to the service provider when eventual consistent reads
are done, but at present these gains have not been passed on to the customer. Thus
on this platform in its current implementation, there is no significant monetary and
performance benefits for a developer to code with eventual consistent reads.
