Consistency Eventualis

Here is just a short note on the unfortunate choice of name for the concept Eventual Consistency. To many non-native speaking people, it sounds like Maybe Consistent.

Many languages have a word derived from the latin word eventualis (German: eventuell, French: éventuel, Danish: eventuelt, …) which in these languages literally means possibly or perhaps - a word used to denote something which may happen, or maybe not. For instance, we would use it in phrases such as [replace underlined word with with "our" version of eventual]:

• Could you perhaps do me a favour?
• What do you think of the possibly fatal outcome?

To an average Dane, for instance, eventually fatal doesn't necessarily sound bad; likewise eventually wonderful is not necessarily good.

This is of course very unfortunate us who want to promote eventual consistency as a tool to provide better scalability and availability in large-scale distributed systems. The term makes it sound flaky, or "perhapsy". "If you are lucky - and the planets all line up correctly - yes, then it will eventually be consistent." It just rings wrong.

So, from now on I propose that we all call it delayed consistency, which at least to my ear sounds much more right. It sounds like we will eventually get there :-)