What is the difference between ACID and eventual consistency?
ACID (SQL) guarantees atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability for every transaction. Eventual consistency (some NoSQL) allows temporary inconsistency between replicas in exchange for better scaling and availability, eventually converging.
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More FAQs in ACID vs Eventual Consistency: Understanding Database Guarantees
For critical data like banking, payments, and inventory where every transaction must be all-or-nothing and data must be immediately consistent. SQL databases like PostgreSQL provide ACID guarantees for these use cases.
For social media feeds, analytics, search, and other data where temporary inconsistency is fine. The system eventually converges, and users do not notice slight delays in propagation.
MongoDB provides ACID for single-document operations by default. For multi-document transactions, MongoDB added support in version 4.0. You can tune read and write concerns to balance consistency and performance for replica sets.
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