Consistency in database systems refers to the requirement that any given database transaction must change affected data only in allowed ways. Any data written to the database must be valid according to all defined rules

I would LOVE for this to be a thing. Just as soon as I can convince people that maybe storing my.cnf in VCS is a better idea than updating it in prod. Live.

Sighs.

It is a thing, just not at that company.

Seriously, get a year or two, then look for escape options.

There's a Mt. Everest climb's worth of distance and effort between "it works" and "best practices", and like successfully climbing Everest, very few companies are doing all of the best practices, and I suspect your dude going the opposite direction by digging with a spoon.

Been a year and a half. Have a 2nd round interview lined up for Thursday to get off this crazy train.

I also happen to be reading The Phoenix Project. Which is...strangely therapeutic ;)

Since then the same patterns (alas, minus the diversity) have worked out a number of times and I’m adamant that adding another lead is far better than consolidating that under one person, at least until you have half a dozen leads.

In fact my most useful mentor and boss said to me look, I trust you guys to sort this out. I want to hear the plans and ask questions but I only need to be involved when you can’t come to an agreement. And then I can be your tie breaker.

I think a lot of things would go better if folks in these positions would audit and break ties and worry about bigger picture stuff most of the time.

I had a boss like this and very much believed in that sort of autonomy, only getting involved-as you said to be the 'tie breaker', but still lead a great engineering team and was a great source of knowledge and mentorship.

I say 'had' for a reason. That reason is mentioned in the post that started this comment chain. Now what's that tell you? Heh...heh :(

Given the politics there I suspect the rest of his time was kissing butts or covering them. Since the end of the dotcom era I’ve never seen a more high minded bunch of Emperors New Clothes types all in one spot. Woof.

Huh, I started reading that earlier today. Between the book and replaying levels in Infinifactory, the words "bottleneck" and "backpressure" loom large in my mind.

But then fast forward to the back end of your career and you've got a kind of weird dilemma. The vast majority of ridiculous things that the young guys try to push is absolute crap. They read about it in a blog post somewhere and don't have nearly enough experience to understand the nuances. Or they have yet another stupid f-ing framework that they just know is going to revolutionise the industry. Yeah... been there, done that, my closet is overflowing with T-shirts, thank you very much.

You sit there thinking, "I spent 20 or 30 years fighting my way through this crap and when I finally have a good handle on it, these new guys are just going to throw it all away". But... Dammit. You absolutely know that one of them has a great idea and you're not quite sure which one of them has it. Because they all think they have it sorted (even when none of them do). They feel they are completely sure that "this is the best way and only a moron couldn't see it". But you know that it's always more subtle than it appears. If you let them all run with their ideas, then 90% (99%???) will crash hard... Let's face it -- just like you did when you had that stupid idea that you were absolutely certain was "the way forward".

Anyway, I belabour the point. From my vantage point, it's pretty difficult to let go. Some people just can't do it. In my position now, I have a lot more sympathy for the "old guard" than I did when I was younger. To be honest, I think it is technically impossible for me to have less sympathy than I did -- and I think this is pretty common in the industry. Probably both sides of the equation are in a similar situation -- neither side feels comfortable letting the other side make decisions.

Just talking out of the hole in my head right now, but I think the main thing is that programmers generally like to program. They like to have freedom to try approaches that they think will be successful. As much as possible, it's probably best to allow your teammates, whoever they are, to have the freedom that they need. At the same time you should expect to have your own freedom. Getting the balance is not easy and sometimes you have to change jobs in order to get into a team where you are allowed the freedom to do your best. In my experience, teams that take this seriously are the best teams to work on (even if they sometimes do stupid things).

That said, in this specific context of tech (or at least in my wheelhouse of Ops), this is surmounted by creating and fostering a culture where it's okay to experiment and fail.

Where we've been handicapped in this regard is specifically not doing that, and the particular individual who makes this difficult having the mentality that any new approach spells doom and actively working against initiatives to put us in a better posture of experimentation in environments that don't sacrifice stability and reliability of our stack (hence the sarcastic comment about giving up my first born child for server immutability--I don't even have kids, haha).

But that said, I think you're absolutely right. I'm not quite greybeard yet-mostly because I yank out every grey hair I see trying to establish residency on my chin, but nonetheless your point is accurate, well taken and definitely that has immense merit.

And that means a huge cost of inconsistency. Every time you need to make a little tweak you have to learn how that part of the app works.

When you just want to get shit done, being able to go into any part of the app and knowing it's built exactly the same way as every other part means you don't have to spend any time learning insert X framework, you spend time doing, implementing business rules and fixing bugs.

A lot of programmers want to spend time playing with tech, not doing because playing with tech is more fun then doing the job.

Worst still, juniors (including me back then) are woefully unaware of just how clueless about programming they actually are, as alluded to by the parent, and that means they have massively over-inflated opinion of their views. They also tend to be wildly optimistic about how long a change will take and totally disregard the human cost (the cost of re-training and loss of productivity) of changing a piece of tech.

Meanwhile, you let him make decisions in his module/plugin/part/web service/whatever while you enforce rules between them.

Also, the work off critical path matters too, it would not be done at all otherwise, so treat it like it matters. It won't take juniors ego if older collegues take that job seriously.

As the technical field, we do not follow the scientific method.

Surely we should be looking to engineering here, not to science.

You clearly have no clue what was the predominant view in 1990s. Consistency wasn't just _a_ thing in the 1990s. It was a core dogma even beyond database systems. It was top of the agenda for a while until it sort of fizzled out in the early 2000s when distributed transactions hit a complexity wall.

For instance, you have to get all participants in a distributed transaction to support the same standard protocol without too much bridging, wrapping, special interface description languages, tons of configuration metadata, etc. You have to agree on a small stable set of features that everyone implements in a robust way.

But the major corporate sponsors of the competing approaches originating in the 1990s and early 2000s got disrupted before any one of them could gain enough traction to bludgeon everyone else into compliance.

My point was merely that almost no one in the 1990s doubted the necessity of consistent transactions. Eventual consistency and all the rest only became popular with NoSQL and the general desire to imitate internet giants that didn't even exist in the 1990s.

Don't let it happen to you.

I know that feel although in my case its non-technical management who just want things to be frozen in time.

Cest la vie at some companies unfortunately. Good luck with your escape plan. :)

Huh, that's exactly how I feel about the "must use a RDBMS for all data" senior architects I've worked with.

Eh, 'but we can't store things/API keys/passwords in VCS! It's bad!' is a pet peeve of mine. No, let's not 'just update it manually when we need it'. No, if outsider getting your DB password (somehow) poses existential threat... Chances are that you have way more concerning problems.

All it takes is one fuckup of accidentally committing to a public repo. Or firing someone on the team but not thinking to rotate secrets. Or hiring an outside contractor that now you implicitly give access to your production AWS credentials, etc.

Secrets do not belong in source control, hard stop.

If the secrets in source control are:

(1) encrypted

(2) never have decryption keys stored/loaded on any developer machine

(3) never have stored decrypted representations (only in memory representation of decrypted forms allowed when required).

If you follow these rules you won’t be more likely to accidentally commit unencrypted versions of the secrets and you’ll also by necessity have setup some (auditable) gatekeeper for logging of decryption events (via an aws kms or similar decryption as a service api).

For the category of secrets which must never exist in any decrypted form on a developer machine — maybe I can see the argument that those should be left out of source control as this would represent a reduction in the surface area for offline attacks against the encrypted form of the secrets -— but I would guess that this actually represents a somewhat minor gain in practice? And also seems strictly unimportant to use cases where access to the decrypted representation of the secrets on the developers machine is mandatory ...

Shameless plug, but check out EnvKey[1].

With 10-15 minutes of effort, it gets secrets out of git, out of email, out of Slack, etc. It manages encryption keys safely behind the scenes, protects development secrets just as strongly as production, keeps devs and servers automatically in sync, and greatly simplifies access control and key rotation.

It's not the only solution out there, but it's by far the easiest to setup and work with. In any case, use something that truly solves the problem! Don't settle for half-measures that end up spraying secrets all over third party accounts. This stuff is serious--even when it comes to so-called development secrets, the line is fuzzy.

1 - https://www.envkey.com

1 - encryption keys and secrets are “hazardous material”, shortened to just “hazmat”. While necessary and arguably crucial in our work, they deserve the same care and respect a chemist would have for a beaker full of particularly dangerous chemicals.

If you have a team of 2-3 people, where everyone has access to everything anyway, and the secrets can't be used from outside the company (i.e. you need access to servers in the first place to authenticate with whatever service is configured), then it's one thing. It's bad, but it sure beats 'let's really carefully update it on all machines manually'.

I just really, really don't like blanket statements such as 'you shouldn't do that, full stop, context is irrelevant'.

Even then, secrets don't even belong in source control. They aren't tied to a specific version of your software -- they're tied to state in other systems: AWS, your MySQL database, a third-party API, etc. Those systems will change independently of any particular release of your code, and having it versioned in source control doesn't actually make sense.

You must track them somehow and a VCS is obviously the right thing to store them in.

Depending on the circumstances, I use git-encrypt, Ansible vault, vim -x (encrypt files) or even RCS (no chance of pushing to a repo when RCS doesn't have that feature).

This one of my criticisms of the 12 factor app. They say put the config in the environment. That doesn't address the question. How and why does it get into the environment and from where?

https://12factor.net/

Storing secrets in version control (with permissions to the repo tightly controlled), encrypted (with the decryption key only available on the compute needing secret access), and used for rendering into a discovery mechanism (or directly injected into instance env vars) is entirely legitimate (and I know of several orgs doing this).

But otherwise yes, storing passwords in vcs is bad. That wasn't necessarily what I meant to imply by suggesting storing configuration files in vcs, however. I probably phrased that poorly.

* S3: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/Introduction...

* GCS: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/consistency

* Azure: exercise left to the reader

The best usages of S3 I've seen are designed to only use the one major form of strong-consistency that S3 guarantees: if you write a key that has never been written to or read from, and then do a read, it will always work. Sticking to this guarantee will avoid nasty difficult/impossible-to-diagnose bugs. To take advantage of this you do things like:

A. Use unpredictable keys (e.g. prefix with a GUID) to guarantee that you don't get EC behaviour, communicate those keys to other services/users after the upload has succeeded B. Store immutable/content-addressable data. Use new keys for new versions of the data (don't ever over-write a key.) If necessary, use an external (strongly-consistent) index to map identifiers to S3 keys. C. Avoid "upload if not exists" in favour of just uploading (e.g. in the case of a possible failure just reupload, don't check if the key exists on S3. Uploads are atomic.)

GCS offers a far greater amount of strong-consistency and this allows makes it much more flexible.

The key to scalability/performance/simplicity of services like S3 is lack of transactions between keys, not eventual consistency. It's informative to start from Paxos and figure out how you'd build an S3 and why it might exhibit EC behaviour like S3 (hint: a caching front-end) and question what value that really brings vs. the extreme decrease in usability (consider that a caching front-end doesn't give you scale-out in the way that lack of cross-key transactions does.)

The same applies to OpenStack Swift, a similar, but self-hosted product. Like S3, when it comes to the CAP rule, they choose availability and partition tolerance.

Source: I'm running Swift clusters at work, and developing applications on top of it for customers and internal use.

The fact that S3 offers the form of strong-consistency that it does means that S3 is already suffering most of the "problems" that strong-consistency implies. If S3 suffered a particularly bad network split, it may not be able to serve reads because it can't be sure that a write didn't happen elsewhere. This obviously applies to new keys (due to their documented guarantees.)

To demonstrate why CAP doesn't say enough to be interesting: imagine building an S3 by starting with etcd (which is based on Raft.) etcd is CP but has scalability/availability issues, so it won't scale out well. Now run multiple independent etcd clusters and shard your keyspace onto those clusters. Now you have arbitrary scalability and your availability is better than a single etcd cluster. Now of course if you were building an S3 you wouldn't actually run it like this (the same process could participate in different Paxos/Raft logs at the same time) but that's the high-level idea.

My point: You can get arbitrarily more availability and throughput without sacrificing strong-consistency, except in some really odd scenarios (no machine can talk to another machine, for example, and you must replicate to multiple machines.) CAP is about 100% availability (vs. 99.9999999%) but some scenarios are dumb and 100% isn't usually necessary. The key to this is that keys in S3/GCS are independent; there are no cross-key transactions.

Eric Brewer (coined the term CAP) wrote about this with respect to Spanner here: "Spanner, TrueTime & The CAP Theorem" https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

The "I want strong consistency but have to use S3 because its the cheapest way to store stuff and its great at serving reads and just otherwise great" option is to maintain an external index that maps between persistent ids (e.g. file paths) and S3 keys. We use this for hosting user content at my company. Our index is in MS SQL of all things ;)

The MVP option is to not to delete stuff. :) This can work well in some scenarios (e.g. you want to keep all versions around anyway) but be careful to not dig a hole that's hard to get out of.

A more esoteric option is lifecycle based cleanup. This can work well for things like a build artifact cache (where an expired key isn't a big deal because you can regenerate it.)

Some of this is discussed in this blog post by Netflix: https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/s3mper-consistency-in-th... (caveat: s3mper is dead(?) and there is an AWS-native solution for HDFS now.)

If you treat S3 as a "I only write new files to you and I want my files to have a TTL," Object Lifecycle Management is the feature for you.

  For example, a financial application might 
  need to show users' account balances. When 
  users make a deposit, they want to see the result 
  of this deposit reflected immediately when 
  they view their balance (otherwise they 
  may fear their money has been lost!). There should 
  never appear to be more or less money in 
  aggregate in the bank than there really is. 

In Europe, since November 2017 banks are moving towards the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer system, which allows transfers in under 10 seconds, between all banks.

So if you’re today using a European bank, your transfers might actually work like this.

The reason the ATM has a limit is because it's eventually consistent. It's possible you just went to another ATM and drained your account, but that hasn't reached the main office yet.

They are limiting their risk by allowing you to defraud them of up to $500 (or whatever your limit is).

It is true in some sense that the banking system is eventually consistent, because commands can be issued asynchronously. For example, you can issue a check, and expect it to be drawn in the future. However, that does not necessarily apply to the ledger itself, and given what I understand about banking technology, I'm somewhat surprised if it is truly as you describe.

If it is indeed a conjecture of yours, I urge you to make it more clear in your comments when you are speculating and when you are speaking with authority.

It's true there are other reasons for the limits, such as the ones you listed, but if you are with say Bank of America, your limit and my limit can be different. The more credit history you've built up with the bank, the higher the limit will be. This is mostly because they trust you more and therefore consider the risk for defrauding smaller.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/nyregion/eight-charged-in-...

99.999% of the time? It's impossible to guarantee that 100% of the time.

If what you are saying is true it would be possible to go overdrawn at an ATM. This (again AFAIK) doesn’t happen as there is a call to check your balance.

See also this article where hackers stole $45 million from ATMs:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/nyregion/eight-charged-in-...

It is most definitely possible, it just rarely happens because the network doesn't fail often.

See here for more sources: https://www.google.com/search?q=eventual+consistency+atm

"For storing critical, transactional data in the cloud, Cloud Spanner offers a unique combination of external, strong consistency, relational semantics, high availability and horizontal scale. Stringent consistency guarantees are critical to delivering trustworthy services. Cloud Spanner was built from the ground up to provide those guarantees in a high-performance, intuitive way. We invite you to try it out and learn more."

Is this a blog post or an advertising whitepaper?

> To quote the original Spanner paper, “we believe it is better to have application programmers deal with performance problems due to overuse of transactions as bottlenecks arise, rather than always coding around the lack of transactions.”

Isn't this a strong argument against the current Microservices trend?

First of all, backwards compatible changes in libraries don't need application updates, by definition.

Second, if your library changes are backwards compatible, you can maintain separate release cycles - this is the normal way of doing things, actually.

Third, microservices simply don't allow backwards incompatible changes. This is a big hint that perhaps your libraries shouldn't do backwards incompatible changes either, as a matter of policy, even though doing them is theoretically possible.

Perhaps you meant deployment instead of releases, and were assuming static linking?

An often seen scenario is that small changes (a one-line bug fix, a tweak in behavior) in application functionality happen to be in the shared library code, so to get that fix to production, you need to redeploy all apps after the library change. Microservices allow you to redeploy just that single shared service.

Doesn't this simply mean that the deployment process is somewhat broken?

On a typical Linux distro, you run "apt-get" or "yum" to upgrade your Heartbleed-fixed OpenSSL, the package manage automatically restarts all affected daemons, and you're done with it.

Even if you deploy static images, a good build system should just re-run the linker after the library change and be done with it.

This means that even on Linux distro's the packages generally are not managed by apt-get or yum. This means that "shared libraries" don't necessarily mean Linux/C shared libraries, but are likely to be packages of Java/PHP/C#/whatever code that are re-used by multiple applications. This means that, for starters, you need to choose when and how you'll push this update to many different machines each running different applications. This means that "automatically restarting all affected daemons" isn't trivial - some of these services may have state (e.g. a deployment that also includes a change to a database), for some of them the downtime matters, you likely don't want to stop&restart all of the instances doing the same thing at once but rather do a rolling deployment. This means that some of the instances that need to be updated are out of your control/administration - you need to send the package to some other organization so that they can re-deploy it. Etc, etc.

Sure, a good build system should just re-run the linker after the library change and be done with it - that solves the packaging part. Deployment often is much trickier; some organizations have a good, robust deployment process but many (most?) don't.

The above statement is also not about performance. (It is about keeping "consistency by default" even if you do have performance critical areas.)

So -- google art project?

Google could catch this automatically...

AWS's storage offering S3 is pretty limited in terms of its consistency model: https://medium.com/@jim_dowling/reflections-on-s3s-architect...

In contrast, Google's filesystem (yes, not an object store, but a filesystem) is hardly known - Collosus. It provides a HA consistent metadata layer to a distributed filesystem. The closest open-source architecture is HopsFS (distributed metadata for HDFS) - disclosure I work on Hops.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/11/sign-up-f...

If I'm right with this, then this is basically stating: "yeah, aws also has a high scale database offering" but it's not really comparable anyhow.

Serverless Aurora can autoscale up and down based on usage, and Aurora has powerful replication functionality, but this is a far cry from Spanner's multi-master horizontal scaling.

DynamoDB can autoscale (crudely), and they just added multi-region multi-master. It's non-relational though and requires more capacity planning than Spanner.

No clue how far it is from General Availability or if it allows even remotely close to the horizontal scaling of Spanner. But it’s at least being worked on.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/11/sign-up-f...

Neither provide the guarantees of TrueTime.

Excerpt: "...The designers of Spanner call this ‘TrueTime’, and it provides a tight bound on clock offset between any two nodes in the system. TrueTime enables high levels of external consistency. As an open source database based on Spanner, our challenge was in providing similar guarantees of external consistency without atomic clocks."

(Not a shill for any company, honestly just curious.)

Google advertises that a $0.90/hour node can do 10,000 reads per second and 2,000 writes per second. Amazon wrote a blog post comparing Aurora and PostgreSQL performance and got ~38,000 TPS on Aurora (vs. ~18,000 on PostgreSQL) on a m4.16xlarge, but that would cost $9.28/hour (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-aurora-update-postgr...). Given that you could make a 10-node cluster for that price with 100,000 reads/second, it seems to be reasonably price competitive.

Even if you were going to run instances yourself, a 16xlarge costs $4.256/hour and 4 spanner nodes seem like they'd be competitive with PostgreSQL (or even Aurora) on that hardware.

When you're building your business, you make trade-offs. Spanner means high-uptime and throughput without worrying about ops and scaling. At my company, we run our own database clusters, but we also have teams of people working on them (Spanner and RDS didn't exist when the company started). Do you want to have to worry about how you'll partition data and make sure everything stays consistent? Do you want to have to write more complex code to accommodate for less consistency? That will mean you're slower to ship features and those features will be buggier. Do you want to hit scaling limits where there isn't a larger EC2 instance to put your database on? Do you want to have to deal with growing those instances?

CockroachDB is meant to handle many of these things, but it's young and you're still going to need to deal with running it. Databases (at scale) can provide all sorts of subtle trouble. For example, in one of our clusters, we lost a node and the cluster decided to rebalance things. But it didn't have the IO capacity to rebalance and started grinding to a halt. This was with a very widely used NoSQL/NewSQL store. Do you like tracing and heap dumps?

The issue with running your own cluster isn't when things are going well, but when things start going sideways.

1. I need to provision N nodes across regions and availability zones

2. I need to patch those nodes

3. I need to back those nodes up

4. I need to build automated systems to rotate those nodes if they become unhealthy

5. I need to build automated systems to restore my entire database from backups in event of disaster

With Spanner, I don't have to do any of that, really. Maybe a bit of fiddling with replicas or something.

(This assumes they're already interested in outsourcing their databases in the first place.)

Edit: Late to the news that Google is selling its spanner warez.

Well it's been in the game longer than anyone else and is battle tested by Google.

But it... literally is? https://cloud.google.com/spanner/

Good question, but... what other NewSQL databases we are talking about here? That is, NewSQL databases that offer strong consistency, and multi-region replication. I do not see many of them.

But even then, the other big thing you have to compete on is pricing, right?

One can only hope Google contributes some of their strong consistency mechanisms to open source so that more developers can be swayed towards strong consistency-based architectures. Spanner is great but creates huge vendor lock-in and some businesses will not repeat old mistakes.

So don't trade off a good attribute unless it's absolutely necessary. Seems sensible

Hosted services have been good for counter-pressure: if your oracle cluster can be replaced with a $50/mo RDS instance, it’s a lot harder to hand-wave around the cost differential.

Has anyone successfully used CockroachDB in production?

As it seems to be the only viable alternative to spanner at the moment.

There is also TiDB which is similar in some ways to CRDB: https://pingcap.com/en/

Having global ordering lets you reason about where your data needs to go, where it needs to be, and overlay different access patterns to see what will work. Heavy write load? Have more shards. Heavy read load? replicate each shard more. Random read/write? Nothing will get you as close to uniform load distribution as global ordering.

> In and eventually consistent system, the programmer must consider what to do in the case of data failure.

Eventually consistency has nothing to do with data failure; the real-world effect of eventually consistency is stale data, which you can't generally tell is stale.

> When building a user authentication system, who better to decide what to do when you can't access the user database than the person writing the user auth system?

I think you're talking about availability, not (eventual) consistency.

> Also, it means that joins must be done in your application.

There is nothing preventing you from doing joins in a strongly consistent database. Google Spanner supports JOINs for example [1].

> In an eventually consistent system, you know if you created a table scan, because you have to pull back a full table's worth of data

This also has nothing to do with eventual consistency.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/query-syntax#join-hint...

> Eventually consistency has nothing to do with data failure; the real-world effect of eventually consistency is stale data, which you can't generally tell is stale.

You're right, that is the highly available distributed part, but it goes along with eventual consistency because if you plan for dealing with stale data then those same concepts protect you from unavailable data.

> I think you're talking about availability, not (eventual) consistency.

Again, the two go hand in hand. Deal with stale data and you've dealt with unavailable data.

> There is nothing preventing you from doing joins in a strongly consistent database.

You misread -- I was saying that with a multi-master key-value system you have to do joins in the app.

> This also has nothing to do with eventual consistency.

Same, I was talking about Dynamo-like systems.

It looks like you’re conflating a well-defined term in distributed systems with properties of particular database implementations that have nothing to do with eventual consistency.

Nothing in your reply is a necessary property of eventually consistent systems, although some eventually consistent systems may be built with those properties. That is quite a huge difference when we’re in the context of the blog post being discussed.

The grayness of your reply should suggest that perhaps you’re misusing the term, rather than everyone else being “confused”.

Unfortunately, I think you've come to the opposite conclusion in this case. When jedberg writes the code for a system backed by an eventually-consistent data store, he asks "What happens if this value is stale and how can I structure the code to cope with that in a sane and reasonable way?"

But when $Random_Dev writes the code for such a system, he asks some combination of "What does eventually consistent mean?", "What do you mean I won't get back the right data?", and "Isn't that the DBA's problem?"

The core issue being that the average dev will punctuate this line of questioning with things that shift the blame elsewhere; if not the DBA, then "Well, it's good enough for [INSERT_TRENDY_COMPANY_HERE] [ reddit? ;) ], so I think we'll be OK!" or "I don't think that will ever happen to us, our reads get consistent quickly enough". Just whatever will punt the issue down the road.

To be honest, I believe that this impulse is the impetus behind the rise in NoSQL in the first place. Devs resent DBAs and SQL. They, very simply, want a place to shove their data, a place to read it out, and to not know anything else about the in between. I have seen many pitiful architectures that clearly turned on this consideration (and we're seeing it all over again with cloud orchestration).

Good developers will dig in and search out the meaning of the data whether the failure case is handled at the DB level or not.

Highly-structured systems like a traditional RDBMS are very good for resiliency because they require someone to put some definition and formality around the dataset to get basic functionality, and they are generally extremely careful about ensuring the things that come in and out of them are safe and accurate. That's the kind of backing that we really need, especially when there are many developers who can't be trusted to even try to understand more than the bare minimum necessary to get a positive quarterly review.

That's not what happens in practice. Just because an RDBMS has transactions doesn't mean a programmer who isn't trying is going to use them correctly. And when you do enforce constraints at the DB level, you end up duplicating all your logic in two different languages, one of which isn't very nice for programming in. E.g. I've never found database timezone handling to be anything other than harmful. The application is just better at enforcing this kind of constraints; a well-designed application could make use of transactionality, but putting the transactionality in the datastore won't make the application better at it if the dev wasn't thinking about it - and if the dev is thinking about it, they can usually do better at the application level.

Definitely true, but RDBMS provide a lot of safety features beyond transactions, like a fixed schema. Mongo et al let developers stuff anything they want anywhere, creating an abominable bastardization between a key-value store and a database. That's their "killer feature" that has resulted in wide adoption so they can't really do away with it, even if some [likely reluctant] Mongo users continue to find ways to self-enforce a schema.

It'd be one thing if Mongo was predominantly used as a staging ground for free-form, unpredictable data, but I think we all know that's not the case. People pretend like it's a replacement for a traditional RDBMS.

>a well-designed application could make use of transactionality, but putting the transactionality in the datastore won't make the application better at it if the dev wasn't thinking about it - and if the dev is thinking about it, they can usually do better at the application level.

I really disagree here. The semantics and detail involved in _actually_ making sure a datum is securely stored, including a high likelihood of being recoverable in the case of a crash, is very complex in any non-trivial system. It's dismissive and naive to pretend that your average application developer, who generally doesn't even know what `fsync()` is, can do a better job at this than a real database, which will include advanced consistency features like intent logs.

Their real killer feature was proper multi-master clustering - being able to seamlessly add and remove nodes from your storage cluster - in a free product. Traditional RDBMS don't do that.

> The semantics and detail involved in _actually_ making sure a datum is securely stored, including a high likelihood of being recoverable in the case of a crash, is very complex in any non-trivial system. It's dismissive and naive to pretend that your average application developer, who generally doesn't even know what `fsync()` is, can do a better job at this than a real database, which will include advanced consistency features like intent logs.

Intent logs are necessary precisely because the database table model is a poor fit for what actually happens - even databases themselves now spend more effort on converting back and forth to the SQL model than on actual storage or query implementation. A developer with the skills to do it right does need a library of certain capabilities, but the RDBMS is not a good interface for supplying them with those capabilities. See e.g. https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-ou... .

In C# for instance using the standard Mongo driver, you're dealing with strongly typed collections and the compiler is keeping you from mistakingly going outside of the "schema".

I don't know how good the other .Net drivers are for other Nosql databases.

We basically come from opposite viewpoints -- I think most devs will do the right thing, you think most will do the wrong thing.

Honestly, you're probably right and I'm probably wrong, but I like to hope that I will always work in a place where I'm right. :)

(It was Netflix BTW, not reddit. For the most part reddit used strongly consistent databases (Postgres), but we did use some eventual consistency in the caching layer).

If you use it in the wrong places, then that almost certainly means increases complexity where you don't necessarily have to. Whether or not that results other positive behaviours seems a bit beside the point to me.

If you managed a team of rock climbers, you could say "I prefer it when my rock climbers don't use safety ropes. It improves their climbing, because if they make a mistake, they'll fall to their death". It could be 100% true, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't simply be picking the right tools for the job.

This comes down to culture. I wish I knew how to create a culture where devs do the right thing, from a culture where they ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Maybe you need the very clearly Netflix model of "Fire every ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

Outside of AWS, Google and Azure I see few cloud services that define their consistency models. And support always says: we are high availability and always consistent.

Same goes for distributed software, few projects define their consistency model, and even fewer honor it.

That despite the fact that I changed my address when I moved (says so in the TxDPS record, running on a "legacy" system), which got sent to the toll agency when I changed it. Of course somewhere in there the toll agency lost this information and never bothered to check the TxDPS record until I pointed out they were repeatedly sending notices to the wrong address.

The point being that, this is only one of many problems they have had with their newfangled toll system because sometimes "eventually consistent" actually means "we threw the update away because a newer one came in, so we lost a critical piece of information.". Critical pieces of information like, people actually paying their tolls for example.

http://www.texasturf.org/2012-06-01-03-09-30/latest-news/484... http://story.kxan.com/txtag-troubles/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/78wp9y/txtag_paymen...

I think I can understand some of your point. Trust should be engineered into the system, not assumed. That is a lot of work and not easy, though. (I think this ultimately lands on the block chain idea of the world. I'm fairly ignorant there.)

Strong consistency just means that you can expect any accesses you performed to be consistent in time with each other, right? To that end, it is nice not having to effectively do a "loopUntilChangeReflected" after every write and checking to see if it is safe to do the next thing. Which you have to do in an eventually consistent world.

If you have to do this, you probably shouldn't be using an eventually consistent system. Eventually consistent systems should only be deployed when a stale read is harmless. For example, it probably isn't a big deal if something reads "5 upvotes" instead of "7 upvotes" before a change fully propagates out.

Wrapping every write in a "block to ensure consistency" loop is just a lossy, slow, terrible and dangerous way to recapture a tiny amount of the consistency available to those who use a system that suits their needs.

I know that in the real world, we don't often get to make these decisions, or there may be one-off edge cases (though really just put these on a system that's safe for them). But I just want to point out to other readers that if you catch yourself doing this, you just need to use a datastore that fits your application's use case.

Yes, even if you just read an article in TechCrunch about the Hippest Coolest Hottest Big-Dataiest 2.0 3.0 4.0 5.0 Data Storage Project That Makes Google and Facebooks' Mouths Water Hadoop-Daboop Machine, That Only Cool People Use, and No Uncool People Or Trump Supporters Of Any Kind Allowed.

Read that article, and then go use Postgres.

I'd still argue that even reasoning about all writes in an, "eventually this is true for everyone else," fashion is less than straight forward.

To that end, components should all be able to assume what they do is strongly consistent. If possible, assume everyone else is behind?

This is in contrast to a bank which should always operate only when there is no partition.

That is, how is it simpler to assume that the data you get back could be wrong? Now, anyone involved with the system seems to have to know how everyone involved in the system interprets results.

This meshes with the articles assertion: strong consistency leads to fewer bugs because fewer possible states exist at application level.

If the "play movie" service calls the auth service and says "should I let this play", the auth service returns "authorized" or didn't give a response or said "maybe authorized" or whatever. The "play movie" service makes the business decision that makes sense for playing a movie, in this case, "go ahead".

But the billing service maybe says "I'm only gonna let you in with a confirmed yes". So it's possible the billing service will give you an error in the same conditions that the movie service does not, but those are business decisions instead of technical ones, which is good.

I'd want strong semantics on, "what is allowed with an authenticated connection with an authentication that is X old?". Preferably, I'd want a somewhat knowable centralized list of the answers. These are not software concerns, but business ones. Right?

Netflix did for a while at least, may still do it. Worst case is that someone didn't pay for the month. The partitions happen rarely enough that it is better to give the user a good experience then not let a legit user in because of a network partition.

But the nice part is that this was a business decision, not a database decision.

Allow them to watch a movie, but don't show billing details.

In theater parlance, people in the theater are assumed authorized to be there by virtue of the entrance requiring authorization.

Right?

Similarly, this had little to do with consistency. Any client that makes a logout should assume the connections it has are no longer valid. To assume otherwise seems odd. Worse, to encourage relying on it.

Worst case would be a renegade client that constantly used the open door, no?

I'm envisioning something on the backend equivalent to:

OnGetVideoChunkRequest: if Authorized(User) or IsDown(AuthSystem) then SendVideoChunk

Now, checking a password in the system should be strongly consistent. In that I should be able to update my password and immediately use the updated password. Any other behavior will surprise me.

For purposes of discussing fail open, how that logic gets translated during implementation doesn't matter. Authorized(User) might be expiring tokens passed in via cookie. IsDown(AuthSystem) could just check some global flag that gets set by some watchdog service on a AuthSystem heartbeat. It could be something else. It doesn't matter because it's not relevant.

Having a direct connection to the AuthSystem or not is an implementation detail, not something that changes the idea "Netflix should fail open".

Similarly, anywhere you are doing idempotent guarantees, strong consistency is vital. Same for customer interaction. Reads following writes that a user made should almost certainly strive for strong consistency. If only to avoid confused customers.

Writes the system makes, though? Expect those to just fail in ways that will leave things inconsistent and constantly check for them.

But my point was eventually consistent systems, in general, force you to think about these things earlier on. Of course there are exceptions in both directions.

This is because, not only did we develop an edict against stored procedures, but we then developed an edict that everything must be done using the lowest consistency model possible. We ended up settling on session consistency. TBH we discovered an algorithm that didn't even require session consistency, but the latency would have been to great. Again, no particular analysis or rationale for the edict, just idealism. The end result was a system that, for each update, required six background jobs to be launched, which each launched their own cascading jobs that patched up the data. And our records all had to be peppered with version fields and updated-by-job fields and version-of-foreign-key fields that these fixup jobs had to test against to make sure they're not operating against stale data or running over each other, such that this crap actually outweighs the actual data in the records. And these background jobs manage state in Table Storage and transfer messages via Service Bus, so two more SPOFs not to mention all the extra compute resource cost. It's a huge mess of a jenga puzzle that's taken months to implement and code review and test, and now even six months later we're still finding edge cases that aren't handled correctly (or are they? you have to constantly go through from the start to really understand it). In addition, since things are never guaranteed to be in a consistent state, that means we could have foreign keys that don't reference anything, or circular graphs where cycles should be disallowed, or whatever else at any moment in time, and so we have to fudge this stuff when presenting data to the user, and it reduces our ability to do any sort of meaningful statistics on our data. To remove 13 lines of javascript. It's just a mess.

And then what happened is a couple new requirements came in that couldn't be reasonably handled in a lazy fashion, so we ended up using stored procs for that logic anyway.

Now, to be clear, the resulting system is strictly more scalable than the stored proc based one. One could in theory just throw more machines at any load and it'll continue to work. So there's that. But a) the load beyond which the stored proc system could scale is about 3 orders of magnitude higher than even our optimistic usage estimates in the foreseeable future, and b) the lazy algorithm requires so much additional compute overhead that, while infinitely scalable, would we even be able to afford it anymore?

So for my money, give me a strongly consistent system by default. I don't even particularly understand the argument given above. With a strongly consistent system, you can still choose to do things like join in the client if there's a reason for it. But going the opposite way and forcing consistency to be unassumed everywhere produces the mess we're dwelling in now.

Now, certainly there are cases where eventual consistency is better: high-write-volume on not-very-relational data where point-in-time accuracy isn't super business-critical is where it typically shines. At the "edges" of your system, essentially. But I do want to point out some of the pain that can be encountered if it's chosen for the wrong use case, and make sure that anyone who does use it in their core application logic knows what they're in for, and puts some more thought into whether it's what they really want.

That sounds bad. The way you're supposed to do it is have the initial data be immutable and compute the downstream data separately, but into its own places.

> So for my money, give me a strongly consistent system by default. I don't even particularly understand the argument given above. With a strongly consistent system, you can still choose to do things like join in the client if there's a reason for it. But going the opposite way and forcing consistency to be unassumed everywhere produces the mess we're dwelling in now.

I'd say transactions should never be the default, because a database transaction that isn't a semantic transaction is worse than useless. If the application programmer hasn't thought about transactionality and synchronization, it's much better for that to show up as not having any transactions - you can fix that, by adding transactions where you need them - than to have transactions that don't mean anything, and the data ending up inconsistent even though no transactions ever overlapped.

There is a time and place for eventual consistency and multi-master, and there is a time for strongly consistent SQL servers.

What Google call 'external consistency' is what's known by relational theory people as 'isolated serializability'.

Ignoring the fact they obviously have a strongly-consistent product to sell, which therefore informs their view, the flaw is that the article is the cliche "I have a hammer therefore everything is a nail".

Honestly, if you go back to the beginning of the article, their first quote sums it up "better to have programmers deal with performance problems ... as bottlenecks arise" admits to the fact that this is the inevitable outcome of strongly consistent systems!

If physics is against it, you're asking for trouble. I've given tech talks around the world on this, just don't pick a fight against physics or else YOU WILL LOSE FAITH in any/all database systems you use: http://gun.js.org/distributed/matters.html .

That is what these strongly consistent database systems run off of, faith (religion) that the database is their god that will solve all their problems. You only need to take a look at http://jepsen.io/ to be proven that basically every single system out there (except for like RethinkDB and one or two others) fail miserably at being strongly consistent even when they are suppose to be.

But hey, they need an excuse to get people to buy into Cloud Spanner - and nothing sounds better than "Hey we're Google, let us manage your data for you, because you aren't smart enough to deal with consistency."

What we're seeing happen is a reinvention of a lot of classical transactional systems from a "massive scale-first" perspective instead of a "local transactions on spinning disk fast" perspective. The eventually and causally-consistent systems have something to add, but I don't think it's wise to discount Google's years of engineering experience in this as religion. Rather, it's reflective of starting to operate at a number of engineers scale at which it has become worthwhile investing very dedicated engineering and research effort into supporting a transactional model, at scale, so that thousands of other engineers can be more productive.

There's a chance this experience doesn't generalize -- recall that Google has massive amounts of dedicated inter-datacenter bandwidth with good management and redundancy, the ability to hire dedicated teams of database & distributed systems experts, etc. But it probably generalizes to the other giant companies in the field -- Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Baidu have similarly huge numbers of "non-distributed-systems-expert developers" who need to get stuff done, correctly, and the ability to invest heavily in the infrastructure to make them more productive.

Another way to summarize it is: At some point, you're going to have to fix problems at the application and algorithm level, and not just hope that the underlying storage system makes everything magic. It's easier when those problems are performance problems than when they're correctness/consistency problems.

(Disclaimer: This is my view as a distributed systems professor, not a one-day-per-week Google employee, but I do have that second hat around.)

What a terrible assertion. Most of the systems that Jepsen tests are AP systems. Basically all of the systems that are supposed to be CP (e.g. etcd [1], Zookeeper [2], CockroachDB [3]) have been shown to be more-or-less fine at what they are supposed to do.

[1] https://aphyr.com/posts/316-call-me-maybe-etcd-and-consul

[2] https://aphyr.com/posts/291-call-me-maybe-zookeeper

[3] http://jepsen.io/analyses/cockroachdb-beta-20160829