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"But are you arguing in favour of blockchain?" No, please see my original comment, where I made this clear: "I don't mean to advocate for cryptocurrency in any
by _vvhw 5y ago
"But are you arguing in favour of blockchain?"
No, please see my original comment, where I made this clear: "I don't mean to advocate for cryptocurrency in any way."
By "modern distributed database", I don't mean blockchain. I just mean "modern distributed database", e.g. things like FoundationDB, Spanner, Aurora or CockroachDB.
"A simple 2-phase commit would do it. Or hell, just a write-ahead log on the application layer."
Of course, and that leads into my second question, also in my original comment:
How are storage faults in the middle of the committed WAL handled? Or is the rest of the committed WAL simply discarded, conflated with a torn write from a system crash?
These questions are important when it comes to storing balances safely. Banks can use all kinds of techniques for defense-in-depth (not to suggest they do), they're not limited to Postgres. But a distributed database is a good thing these days, no?
- knorker 5y agoGotcha. I'm also excited about the modern distributed databases. They're pretty awesome. But yeah, a HN comment is not the right place to design a resilient DB setup. Like I said it's not terra incognita, but it's also not just "spin up a postgres".
- _vvhw 5y ago"Gotcha. I'm also excited about the modern distributed databases. They're pretty awesome." Awesome! "HN comment is not the right place to design a resilient DB setup." Why not? In my experience, HN is always the place to talk about building stuff, running stuff, and how to do that better. :)
- knorker 5y agoWell, one reason is "you're posting often, slow down". I tried to reply yesterday, but was blocked. The gist of my reply yesterday was "depends on requirements, and even they will be huge. And if we just design from made up requirements that's a lot of work to produce a design that nobody will use".