"Note that if you do a mere psql, it will fail since it will try to connect you to a default database having the same name as you (ie. whoami). template1 is the admin database that is here from the start."
Old relational model: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability
New model: Basically Avaiable, Soft state, Eventual consistency
BASE prioritizes availability over consistency
Formally: The Consistency, Availability, Partitioning (CAP) theorem
"only two of the three CAP properties can be achieved at the same time"
"Examples of popular NoSQL stores include key-value stores, such as Amazon’s DynamoDB and Redis; column-family stores, such as Google’s BigTable (and its open source version HBase) and Facebook’s Cassandra; and document stores, such as MongoDB."