Software Engineering Daily · Thursday, September 10, 2026
Joe Hellerstein discusses the origins of the CAP theorem, stemming from an effort by his colleague Greg Brewer to build the Inktomi search engine. Early attempts using transactional databases for search proved problematic due to availability issues when nodes failed, highlighting the need for different consistency models in distributed systems.
“So cap was an effort by my colleague Greg Brewer at Berkeley to try to articulate, and it was early.”
“So they were building the Inktomi search engine, which is essentially the predecessor of Google.”
“And all the transnality guarantees that the database provided were getting in the way of availability.”
“So if a single node in the database went down, the database would say, uh oh, it's not safe to run transactions, and it would lock you out, right?”