ACIDlike

ACIDlike is a term used to describe systems or design approaches that aim to provide guarantees similar to ACID properties—Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability—in environments where strict ACID transactions are difficult to achieve. It signals an intent to offer strong transactional behavior without always delivering full ACID compliance across all operations or nodes.

In practice, ACIDlike semantics may be achieved through mechanisms such as durable write-ahead logging, transactional logs, and robust commit protocols (for example, two-phase commit) or consensus-based replication (such as Raft or Paxos). Some platforms implement ACID-like guarantees for specific operation boundaries, such as single-key or single-document transactions, or within bounded contexts in microservice architectures. Others rely on event sourcing or log-based architectures that emphasize durability and recoverability while maintaining idempotence and replayability.

Applications and scope of ACIDlike concepts are common in distributed databases, cloud-native data stores, and streaming platforms where global strong consistency is desirable but strict, global ACID compliance across all nodes can incur high latency or complex coordination. ACIDlike guarantees are often designed to balance reliability with performance by restricting strong guarantees to certain operations or contexts while allowing weaker consistency elsewhere.

Limitations and caveats include the fact that ACIDlike does not guarantee true ACID under all failure modes, such as network partitions or correlated crashes. The guarantees can vary by system and workload, and implementing ACIDlike semantics can introduce complexity and performance overhead. Understanding the exact guarantees requires consulting a given platform’s documentation and its defined transaction model.

See also: ACID, BASE, transactional systems, distributed consensus, two-phase commit, serializable isolation, idempotence.