ACID properties of RDMS seem crucial but these seem to pose some roadblocks for larger systems in terms of AVAILABILITY and performance. NoSQL provides an alternative to ACID called BASE.

BASE means:

• Basic Availability
• Soft state
• Eventual consistency

Most NoSQL databases do not provide TRANSACTION support by default, which means the developers have to think how to implement transactions. Many NoSQL stores offers transactions at the SINGLE document (or row etc.) level. For example, In MongoDB, a write operation is atomic on the level of a single document, even if the operation modifies multiple embedded documents within a single document.

Since a single document can contain multiple embedded documents, single-document atomicity is sufficient for many practical use cases. For cases where a sequence of write operations must operate as if in a single transaction, you can implement a two-phase COMMIT in your application. It’s harder to develop software in the fault-tolerant BASE compared to the ACID, but Brewer’s CAP theorem says you have no choice if you want to SCALE up.

ACID properties of RDMS seem crucial but these seem to pose some roadblocks for larger systems in terms of availability and performance. NoSQL provides an alternative to ACID called BASE.

BASE means:

Most NoSQL databases do not provide transaction support by default, which means the developers have to think how to implement transactions. Many NoSQL stores offers transactions at the single document (or row etc.) level. For example, In MongoDB, a write operation is atomic on the level of a single document, even if the operation modifies multiple embedded documents within a single document.

Since a single document can contain multiple embedded documents, single-document atomicity is sufficient for many practical use cases. For cases where a sequence of write operations must operate as if in a single transaction, you can implement a two-phase commit in your application. It’s harder to develop software in the fault-tolerant BASE compared to the ACID, but Brewer’s CAP theorem says you have no choice if you want to scale up.