https://deamondev.github.io/tags/sequential-consistency/Recent content in Sequential-Consistency on Things I sometimes delve intoHugoen-usTue, 12 May 2026 22:04:26 +0200https://deamondev.github.io/posts/introduction-to-sequential-consistency-and-linearizability/Tue, 12 May 2026 22:04:26 +0200https://deamondev.github.io/posts/introduction-to-sequential-consistency-and-linearizability/<h2 id="introduction">Introduction</h2> <p>Recently, I’ve been enjoying a brilliant read of <em>Database Internals: A Deep Dive Into How Distributed Data Systems Work</em> by Alex Petrov, which I was inspired to pick up by a colleague I had the pleasure of working with at a start-up (a big hello to you, Raphael). This book is an exceptionally good introduction to storage engines, though I felt that some rather important topics related to the theory of distributed systems were given rather short shrift (inevitably, given that it is a book of moderate length). So I decided to expand on one of the topics that was only briefly covered there, and which is often described in a rather convoluted manner in various tutorials or documentation pages for a given database. I therefore decided to describe two key concurrency guarantees, leaving out other, presumably equally important guarantees (such as casual consistency). However, I hope that after reading my notes, it will be a little easier for someone to delve into the other guarantees and, above all, that it will clarify vague definitions and help to understand the proofs of correctness <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-waving">by waving one’s hands around</a>.</p>