I recently came across this question from Yehuda-Daniel Korotkin in the NoSQL forum of Linkedin asking “Do you think it possible to make transactions in NoSQL?”

I encounter this question in one form or another pretty much all the time and respondents usually steer the person to the many resources that show that, quite reasonably, you can make a transaction with NoSQL… if the database technology is architected form the start to support it.

This time, however, one of the first comments

Norman Hartweg Acid Test posters, 1965

If you grew up in the ’60s then an ACID Test was a phrase associated with Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) as part of his investigations into hallucinogenic drugs. However, the meaning of an acid test goes back much further – to the gold rush – when acid was used by miners to determine if they had found the riches they were seeking. Since then, it has come to have a more general meaning, neatly summarized as: A sure test, giving

My last post talked about Enterprise NoSQL and ACID vs. BASE in the context of handling data variety. In this one I’d like to delve deeper into transactional, Enterprise NoSQL.

Let’s start by focusing on the main question: How can one guarantee cross-record ACID transactions in a horizontally-scalable, schema-agnostic database?

The short answer is an architectural pattern called Multi Version Concurrency Control or MVCC.

The basic notion behind MVCC is that records are never modified,

I joined MarkLogic 3 months ago and it is an exciting time to be selling the only Enterprise NOSQL database that manages “any-structured data” (including XML) with its ACID compliance, JSON, SQL and REST interfaces, HA and DR functionality – exciting that is once I can decipher the acronyms. More pertinently, understand the capabilities those acronyms represent and how they deliver the value that around 400 MarkLogic customers benefit from every day.

I decided to get myself to a place where the

MarkLogic is going to be helping the U.S. government to develop the next generation of secure cloud computing services to support Multi-INT data management and analysis.

We’ll be doing this by participating in the CTE (Continuous Transformational Environment) Lab hosted within the QTS (Quality Technology Services) data center in Virginia. Leading hardware and software vendors are participating in the lab (it will feature a variety of COTS and GOTS products), and a launch event is being held