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To clarify, I wasn't intending to speak about any particular OSS datastore or any specific proprietary one. I meant a general hypothetical situation where I'm

To clarify, I wasn't intending to speak about any particular OSS datastore or any specific proprietary one. I meant a general hypothetical situation where I'm the decision maker and also the DBA. I have my own experiences with different products. Likely a lot of other people do too. I don't really think that the weaknesses exposed in the Jepsen tests would be covered by your everyday person on IRC. I mean, I'm one of those everyday people on IRC talking about the things I do and don't know about. I could tell you from personal experience that I've had a bad run with MySQL and MongoDB in production. But I couldn't tell you exactly what went wrong or where or why. I could talk to you about the symptoms, but I couldn't address the root causes off the top of my head. And that's exactly the point that I'm trying to ask about here. Let's say that I know OSS database is weak in certain situations. Then I know exactly what those are and what to do to protect myself or at the very least what use cases not to deploy them for. The same can't be said for proprietary products like Redshift. I might know, anecdotally that it does or doesn't fail, but I don't know exactly how or why or what to do to protect myself. I was asking how other people in this situation make their decisions. Obviously, a lot of people use a lot of things that don't get CAP theorem right. And perhaps a lot of people never experience any problems. But if I'm going to be extremely thorough about this, I wonder what other people think about when making these same decisions.

zenlikethat 10y ago
If it's proprietary tech than that risk is part of the game. This is one reason FOSS zealots are so, well, zealous. Without access to the source code for auditing, and especially without access to proprietary programs for running at all, your chances of properly evaluating the software is effectively nil. The choice between proprietary data systems seems more likely to be driven by the reputation of the company than by the reputation of the tech. The whole point of paying when OSS alternatives are available is that when something breaks or goes wrong you actually have a proverbial "neck to choke" (one that isn't your own ;) ).

zenlikethat 10y ago

If it's proprietary tech than that risk is part of the game. This is one reason FOSS zealots are so, well, zealous. Without access to the source code for auditing, and especially without access to proprietary programs for running at all, your chances of properly evaluating the software is effectively nil. The choice between proprietary data systems seems more likely to be driven by the reputation of the company than by the reputation of the tech. The whole point of paying when OSS alternatives are available is that when something breaks or goes wrong you actually have a proverbial "neck to choke" (one that isn't your own ;) ).