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Software Engineering vocabulary · Databases and Persistence

Eventual consistency

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounAdvanced term

In software engineering, eventual consistency means: A guarantee that, if no new changes are made, all copies of the data will become the same after a short time, although reads may briefly return old values.

In Turkish: nihai tutarlılık, zamanla tutarlılık

How it is used

Common in distributed and NoSQL systems such as Cassandra and DynamoDB, which offer it to stay fast and available. The opposite is strong consistency. In practice, teams design screens so that slightly old data is acceptable, for example like counts.

Example sentences

  1. Because of eventual consistency, a new comment may take a second to appear in other regions.

  2. Eventual consistency is fine for view counts but not for account balances.

Common collocations

  • eventual consistency model
  • eventually consistent
  • strong consistency
  • consistency guarantees
  • CAP theoremThe idea that when a network failure splits a distributed database, it must choose between consistency (same data everywhere) and availability (always answering).
  • NoSQLA broad group of databases that do not use the classic table-and-SQL model, storing data as documents, key-value pairs, wide columns or graphs instead.
  • replicationKeeping copies of the same database on several servers by sending every change from one server to the others, for safety and to share the load.
  • ACIDAtomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability: the four guarantees that make database transactions reliable even with errors, crashes and many users at once.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Databases and Persistence

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