I would wager, in complete ignorance of the real implementation, that the knowledge that they can overbook means that they can relax some of their requirements. If two servers can’t talk to each other to coordinate for a while, they could still each sell tickets.
No, it's because of CAP forces to make a compromise. If there was a way to be available and consistent there would not be overbooking. But they chose availability because losing sales is worse than dealing with overbooking.
Exactly same with Amazon, they will not bother checking that the product is actually available because then you will miss the sale when the warehouse service is down or slow, which it would be all the time because it has to be a single place of failure. Its better to refund orders for non existent items than to miss sales.
Consistency requires single source of truth which implies single place of failure. There is tremendous cost to it, it's not done for no reason like you say.
Airlines operate on the principle that a certain percentage of customers are no show. They would like to fly the planes fully booked so they allow some overbooking and they are controlling how much it gets overbooked.
If it was up to CAP there would be 200% overbooking for certain flights and the airline would go bust within a year.
macintux|3 years ago
esailija|3 years ago
Exactly same with Amazon, they will not bother checking that the product is actually available because then you will miss the sale when the warehouse service is down or slow, which it would be all the time because it has to be a single place of failure. Its better to refund orders for non existent items than to miss sales.
Consistency requires single source of truth which implies single place of failure. There is tremendous cost to it, it's not done for no reason like you say.
StreamBright|3 years ago
This is not the case at all.
Airlines operate on the principle that a certain percentage of customers are no show. They would like to fly the planes fully booked so they allow some overbooking and they are controlling how much it gets overbooked.
If it was up to CAP there would be 200% overbooking for certain flights and the airline would go bust within a year.