[MichaelSalib]

Ignorance is not an excuse. It just isn't.

I'm not interested in excusing anything, I'm interested in understanding the real world. And what I see is that a lot of people who insist on the absolute need for ACID don't really understand it because they're using non-ACID technology right now.

I do not understand what point you are trying to make here.

Consider MySQL with asynchronous replication to a slave. In a weak sense, that is a distributed system because the remote slave is on a different machine (and probably very distant) from the master. But the distributed bit here doesn't interfere with correctly implementing ACID: MySQL with async replication operates identically to single node MySQL: it just transmits the binary logs to a slave server. The database system itself is a single-node service whose state gets replicated at transaction boundaries.

In contrast, distributed shared-nothing databases like Volt have to work really hard to maintain consistency: there is no single node in those systems that does all the work and gets replicated: multiple nodes have to cooperate in order to get anything done.