[antirez]

The article is good, however probably there is some issue here: "so quorum operations are not CAP-available (at least temporarily, until the database sets up additional replicas on the minority side)."

Availability is an eventual property, so technically speaking if the minority partition within a non-infinite amount of time always recovers and is able to provide a reply for our query, it is Available from the POV of CAP. However this requires the DB to be always able to create new replicas in the minority side and eventually reply to the query, and I'm not sure this is the case in Dynamo-alike systems when there is a single-node partition.

[simongui]

What you describe is not how quorums work in the Dynamo paper or for example in Riak (a Dynamo implementation). It does not require the DB to create replicas on the minority side of a partition. The Dynamo paper (and Riak implements this) includes Sloppy Quorums to increase availability.