Wow. This is one of the most blatant examples of taking things out of context I've ever seen. The "annihilated" sentence you're referencing is part of a thought experiment in the post about an ideal system that's infeasible but instructive!
Here's the proper context for that statement:
"The simplest way to compute a query is to literally run a function on the complete dataset. If you could do this within your latency constraints, then you'd be done. There would be nothing else to build.
Of course, it's infeasible to expect a function on a complete dataset to finish quickly. Many queries, such as those that serve a website, require millisecond response times. However, let's pretend for a moment that you can compute these functions quickly, and let's see how a system like this interacts with the CAP theorem. As you are about to see, a system like this not only beats the CAP theorem, but annihilates it.
The CAP theorem still applies, so you need to make a choice between consistency and availability. The beauty is that once you decide on the tradeoff you want to make, you're done. The complexity the CAP theorem normally causes is avoided by using immutable data and computing queries from scratch."
Here's the proper context for that statement:
"The simplest way to compute a query is to literally run a function on the complete dataset. If you could do this within your latency constraints, then you'd be done. There would be nothing else to build.
Of course, it's infeasible to expect a function on a complete dataset to finish quickly. Many queries, such as those that serve a website, require millisecond response times. However, let's pretend for a moment that you can compute these functions quickly, and let's see how a system like this interacts with the CAP theorem. As you are about to see, a system like this not only beats the CAP theorem, but annihilates it.
The CAP theorem still applies, so you need to make a choice between consistency and availability. The beauty is that once you decide on the tradeoff you want to make, you're done. The complexity the CAP theorem normally causes is avoided by using immutable data and computing queries from scratch."