I was researching Scala DB frameworks/wrappers, and came across Gizzard, from Twitter. While I was impressed at first, I cooled down when I read the restriction. They say that all DB operations you make have to be both idempotent and commutative. If I understand properly, this basically leaves almost nothing left. As an example, if I have an entity with an integer counter, and it has to be incremented. I can either use an “increment” operation, or a “set” operation. But increment would not be idempotent (if you run it twice, you get a different result then running it once), and set would not be commutative (setting first 5 and then 2 gives a different result then setting first two and then 5). So is there anything left apart from “insert-if-absent”, which isn’t very useful for most use-cases. What is the point of a distributed database framework which is so constrained that you basically cannot do anything useful with it? I must be missing something important.
[EDIT] Apart from “insert-if-absent” (and “delete-if-present”), I think that “compare-timestamp-and-set” would be both idempotent and commutative, if changes are queued instead of discarded, when “previous changes” are still missing. But I don’t know if any DB implements that.
Commutative operations are just operations that cause a value to grow monotonically. Idempotent examples of said operations are: