You make some reasonable points, but I would say a couple things here: - If we're sticking with your example further up-thread, you'd buy a house that was adve

You make some reasonable points, but I would say a couple things here: - If we're sticking with your example further up-thread, you'd buy a house that was advertised as "can withstand a 4.0 magnitude earthquake", that then failed when subjected to a 4.0 magnitude earthquake. - 4.0 magnitude earthquakes happen all of the time [0]. More or less what I'm saying is, engineers generally don't think DBs lose data, and when they start coming up with ways that might happen (node failure, network failure, clock desync), distributed DBs assure them with algorithms and configuration knobs. Aphyr puts those assurances to the test, which is so, so valuable to us all. It's also worth saying that this space is pretty technically complicated. All the DB engineers I know use some form of Jepsen-style testing (or Jepsen itself) because it's amazingly great. [0]: https://research.google/pubs/pub40801/ https://research.google/pubs/pub40801/