ACID Encountering the CAP Theorem: Two Bank Case Studies

Abstract

In the era of big data, we may adopt the distributed architecture for a transaction processing system due to some reasons, including distributed branches, heavy demand and operational expenditure, etc. In terms of the CAP Theorem, a transaction processing system associated with ACID properties is infeasible to work well in the distributed architecture. It is indispensable to address how to make a trade-off between availability and partition tolerance for a bank as it favors the consistency in the distributed system. In this research, we conduct two case studies to address the question using two transaction logs collected from a bank in China. We mainly analyze the table dependency and the table concurrency, and find that (1) it is arduous to partition the data in the database system associated with ACID properties, (2) in-memory architecture for updating transactions may be an alternative for building a transaction processing system.