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by SoftwareMaven 4802 days ago
Reading this, it doesn't sound like you said anything different. Sure, it isn't the ATM itself that makes the decision, but the authorization system can still step in and allow a transaction that is not committed to the actual account's log.

I'm sure that, under the hood, there are a lot of ACIDic transactions going on, but, stepping back, it still looks pretty BASEic. When I hit "withdraw $200", there is no guarantee that my actual account has a transaction commit for that amount. Instead, there may just be a log message saying "SoftwareMaven withdrew $200".

1 comments

Yes and I acknowledged this at the end of my comment I think.

I don't really think it is useful to try and use the terms ACID/BASE to refer to the aggreggate process behavior of an entire industry's technology. Not that it is wrong, it just really doesn't mean anything at that point. Most data interchange that takes place between thousands of different parties is going to have similar characteristics. Maybe a market/exchange is a good counter-example but I can't think of many others.