In this post, the author discusses consistency and isolation levels in distributed databases. They argue that consistency is a complex topic with poorly defined vocabulary, and introduce a taxonomy for consistency levels based on Daniel Abadi's work. The author emphasizes the importance of understanding both isolation and consistency levels when discussing behavior in CockroachDB compared to other databases. They also provide a comparison matrix focusing on isolation levels implemented in PostgreSQL and CockroachDB, highlighting possible anomalies for each combination.