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there are tougher problems like high-performance cross-document distributed ACID, but I think the industry as a whole is relatively far away from that right now

Megastore and Spanner solve that problem, with varying tradeoffs:

http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36971.html

http://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html

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Our internal database does too (with a different design than Spanner, but stuff still comes "online" atomically for everyone across the globe at the same time, with similar latency). Unlike FoundationDB, and like Spanner, we're doing it with complex object graphs, not just key-values, and we also do it with consistent secondary indexing (I'm not sure if Spanner supports this or not).

This isn't "the future", this is now. People are doing it, and have been for awhile. If you're going to "rethink the database", distributed global consistency should be at the top of your list today. RethinkDB seems like its merely "rethinking" Mongo.

The main benefit of global consistency, of course, is ease of use. Global consistency is so much easier to reason about and write code for!

Hi Erich - I'm curious... you refer to your "internal database" doing distributed ACID but state that you're not with Google. Can you say who you're with? It's interesting to us to know who is also working on this problem.

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