  We posit that striving for distributed systems that provide "single system
image" semantics is fundamentally flawed and at odds with how systems operate
in the physical world. We realize the database as an optimization of this
system: a required, essential optimization in practice that facilitates central
data placement and ease of access to participants in a system. We motivate a
new model of computation that is designed to address the problems of
computation over "eventually consistent" information in a large-scale
distributed system.
