frequently asked questions about docs HOT 7 CLOSED

Draft at http://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/frequently-asked-questions.html

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Feedback from @vivekmenezes:

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could be:

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Nice FAQ!

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@jseldess
What do you think of adding a table of contents to the top of the FAQ? It will make it easier to hop to questions that are relevant. Perhaps the TOC could only appear in the left-side menu so that it's not causing the actual answers to drop below the fold.

from docs.

• successor to Paxos -> alternative to Paxos
• wonky sentence: When failures occur, replication ensures the continued availability of replicas and Raft ensures the consistency of replicas.
  Suggestion: Raft replication ensures that when failures occur, another replica can resume operation consistently.
• This means that concurrent transactions on the same data, whether reads or writes, will never result in anomalies: there's still the commit timestamp reordering anomaly (only linearizable mode gets rid of that). Not sure if it's worth mentioning.
• Consistency: I think this point should focus on our optimistic concurrency model. Raft is really more about keeping consistent replicas (which is another meaning of "consistent")
• Durability: again there is a mixup of Raft and Replication which I think could be clarified.

from docs.

PR #111 gets this almost final. Leaving this issue open so @tschottdorf can help me rewrite the texts for how Cockroach DB supports the C and D in ACID.

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Could you point me towards the segments of text you want me to look at in particular? Thanks.

from docs.

Sure, @tschottdorf: https://github.com/cockroachdb/docs/blob/gh-pages/frequently-asked-questions.md#does-cockroachdb-have-acid-semantics. See your earlier comments about the Consistenty and Durability explanations. It'd be great if you could offer some basic revisions.

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