The theory in question addresses distributed database systems. A remote client connected to a monolithic database is not a distributed database system. If there is a network partition between the client and the server then you don't get C or A. You get nothing.

The P refers to partitions between nodes of the database system. Not clients.

So that point in the article doesn't seem to make sense.

> You get nothing.

You don't get nothing, you get inconsistency that could require even human intervention to fix. For example, if client lost connection right before the database was able to respond that his commit was successful. Client then retries and you get a typical double billing problem.

That's because monolithic database with a remote client is in fact a distributed system and strong consistency in a distributed system requires proper distributed algorithms and protocols, where clients are nodes too. You cannot guaranty consistency otherwise (to be precise, you will need clients to be able to wait indefinitely to guaranty strong total consistency, but if clients are used by humans they will not do that and the only consistency you can guaranty for a human is eventual consistency).

At this point we're edging into a semantic argument, but I would consider client-server architecture to be a type of distributed system. For the record, wikipedia lists "Client server architecture" on their page of distributed systems too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing#Architec...