BASE
An alternative to ACID for distributed systems: Basically Available, Soft state, Eventually consistent. Trades strong consistency for availability.
What is BASE?
An alternative to ACID for distributed systems: Basically Available, Soft state, Eventually consistent. Trades strong consistency for availability.
BASE is a foundational concept that sits in the Database Fundamentals area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "BASE" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
Learn BASE in depth
Full interactive lesson with diagrams, code examples, real-world references, and a quiz.
Open the BASE lessonRelated lessons
Lessons that touch on BASE as part of a larger topic.
Database Profiling
Find slow queries and optimize database performance. EXPLAIN plans, index analysis, and query rewriting
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Database Query Caching
Letting the database cache query results so the same question gets an instant answer
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Database Functions
Reusable logic that lives inside the database, computed columns, transformations, and business rules
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Database Indexing
B-trees, hash indexes, composite indexes, covering indexes, the single biggest performance lever in any database
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Database Connection Pooling
PgBouncer, HikariCP, and why opening a new database connection per request is a recipe for disaster
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See also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
ACID
Four guarantees for database transactions: Atomicity (all or nothing), Consistency (valid states only), Isolation (no interference), Durability (changes persist).
CAP Theorem
In a distributed system, you can only guarantee two of three: Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance. You must choose your trade-off.
NoSQL
Databases that don't use traditional table-based relational models. Includes document stores, key-value, graph, and column-family databases.