Re:An Illustrated Proof of the CAP Theorem
by ithkuil on Saturday July 14, 2018 @03:03PM
(#17531802)
It seems you think about partition tolerance in terms of whether the whole system tolerates a partition. Usually partition tolerance is intended as the ability of every single node to accept operations (e.g. new writes) even if said node is on the minority side of a partition, and still operate within specs (i.e. the database offloads consistency problems to the application, usually also guaranteeing some form of eventual consistency)
There's no point in having a system if it gives incorrect answers (inconsistent).
In the real world, you have to make tradeoffs.
Partition tolerant is "most important", it's awkwardly factored out of Availability -- "tolerant" is a variant of available. Your system can't be "partition intolerant "just because that means "not always unavailable".
Another way of looking at it is what you imply: "partition tolerant" is a synonym for "distributed".