Concurrent Writes

We have previously learnt how strict quorum reads and writes can be employed in leaderless replication and allow us to retrieve latest data values for the most part. However, using strict quorums doesn’t prevent concurrent writes for the same data value resulting in conflicts, which if not resolved can result in data loss.

Before we embark on learning how conflicts are resolved or avoided with quorum writes, we shall explain what is meant by a concurrent write. Generally, concurrent writes are understood to mean writes that happen at exactly the same time. In distributed systems, clocks can’t be perfectly ...