Software Engineering Daily · Thursday, September 10, 2026
Joe Hellerstein explains that the CAP theorem emerged from the need to articulate tradeoffs between correctness and availability in distributed systems. He notes that early search engines, like Inktomi, found that strict transactional consistency from databases hindered availability, leading to the exploration of different consistency models.
“So Eric was trying to articulate in a semi-formal way like, what tradeoffs do you have to make between some notion of correctness and availability.”
“And cap.”
“Moreover, a search engine doesn't really need transactional consistency.”