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A lot of things have improved in distributed databases as of late. There are distributed databases today (my co. provides one) that can have strict serializability (the highest data integrity level) for hyper scale applications. Tolerating "eventual consistency" is largely a choice, oftentimes forced because your DB application or implementation (NoSQL and traditional RDBMS, depending on their implementation) does not provide you strict transaction guarantees. There are third parties (https://jepsen.io/analyses is a great source) that can evaluate and validate such claims. A lot of the anecdotal information in this thread here is no longer accurate or applicable. Yes, there are databases (like Fauna) that don't compromise on the highest transactional levels, and yes, there are more widely used databases (MongoDB, DynamoDB, and many others) that either cannot make those guarantees, or their implementation by their service provider cannot demonstrate that guarantee. Happy to provide more info if interested.