CockroachDB (the product I work on) isn’t linearizable in the colloquial sense. Spencer Kimball gives a good outline of this in Living Without Atomic Clocks. Despite this, its guarantees with respect to real-time ordering are slightly stronger than “nothing”. Transactions obey a timestamp ordering, it’s just that the order in which timestamps are allocated in a distributed system such as Cockroach don’t necessarily respect what we would think of as “real-time ordering”. Or do they?...