ACID is the gold standard for transactionality in highly available enterprise databases, what you get from two-phase commits. As a result, such databases are inherently partition intolerant. If you can’t have ACID in the Cloud, then what can you have? You can have BASE: Basic Availability, Soft State, and Eventual Consistency.

Read the entire post at http://blog.devx.com/2012/08/raising-your-ph-levels-for-the.html.