[treebot]

Plenty of user facing apps do need strong consistency. We use Cassandra at Ripple, for API access to the XRP ledger, and strong consistency is a requirement. Records refer to other records, and not being able to reason about when things are going to show up in the database would lead to a ton of complexity. For instance, I read a transaction, then I want to read the account that sent or received that transaction. I need to know the record for the account is going to be there in the database, and is consistent with the transaction, as opposed to stale. Or, a client might be paging through data over several calls, where we return a marker to allow the client to resume. This wouldn't work if some nodes might not know about the marker.