Why Cassandra doesn't need vector clocks : DataStax

Why Cassandra doesn’t need vector clocks : DataStax

Siblings — multiple versions generated by conflicting updates — are difficult to deal with in practice, to the point that Riak makes last-write-wins the default despite the high potential for data loss.

Vector clocks are good at helping clients with simple merges like the above user object, but it’s important to understand that vector clocks only tell you that a conflict occurred, and not how to resolve it; as Basho put it, even with perfect implementation you can’t have perfect information about causality in an open system without unbounded information growth. This is why Cassandra and later Riak both had to go beyond vector clocks when implementing counters.

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