This sounds like a bottleneck? Otherwise it sounds similar to the CAS instruction in assembly, take the ‘last’ state and if if the same then run these instructions else bail out…
Hmm, yeah I wonder how they get around this bottleneck. Plus what if these servers go down? In Riak as long as a suitable number of servers are running then the thing is up, and even if worst-case certain specific nodes went down then only some data becomes inaccessible but the rest is still accessible. Hmm…
I am guessing that that role is assigned dynamically using paxos. Again if you watch the video about how they are testing the thing it will become clear that they account for much harsher scenarios.
I search for “data-parallell multithreaded algorithm foundationdb” but only came to the same documentation or this forum.
One paper did come up: “A mutlithreaded parallell implementation of a dynamic programming algorithm for sequence comparison”. But that seems to have to do with DNA sequencing.
To me this sounds like marketing speak ala MongoDB. Perhaps I am a bit too sceptical because promises made by other product-teams in the past but I’d rather be given a reference to the academic research behind this algorithm, and known flaws and weaknesses, than being told it is sophisticated.
Setting aside that marketing speak is generally marketing speak, I have watched the video that keeps being suggested in this thread and it’s very good and enough to make me less skeptical than normal.
If you check the hn thread for the open source release of Foundation, you can see that a number of people are curious about about conflict checking/resolution, and were answered, and searching there for “conflict” might eventually turn up more useful information.
I’d watch the video I am not eloquent enough to describe and can’t do it justice. If you have even a cursory interest in distributed systems you will not waste your time it’s very little about foundationDB and pretty much about using deterministic simulation for testing distributed systems. There is 0 reason for it to be marketing it’s not a product for sale or to be licensed it’s a technology Apple acquired in 2015 for internal use and recently open sourced a part of it.
It really does sound very cool, but I must confess I just about choked when I saw that it requires both Mono AND a JDK 
I thought it was strange that the Foundation announcement came shortly after the big announcement for CockroachDB. The two live in similar spaces.