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Cool! I've started to look into RethinkDB in the past, and I'm very interested in the features it claims. However, I only have so much time to investigate new

Cool! I've started to look into RethinkDB in the past, and I'm very interested in the features it claims. However, I only have so much time to investigate new primary storage solutions, and our team has been burned in the past by jumping too quickly on a DB's bandwagon when the reliability, performance, or tooling just wasn't there. As of late, we've come to rely on Aphyr's wonderful Call Me Maybe series[0] as a guide for which of a DB's claims are to be trusted and which aren't. But even when Aphyr hasn't tested a particular DB himself, some projects choose to use his tool Jepsen to verify their own claims. According to at least 1 RethinkDB issue on Github, RethinkDB still hasn't done that[1]. Not to poo poo on the hard work of the RethinkDB team, but for me, the TL;DR is NJ;DU (No Jepsen, Didn't Use) [0] https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen [1] https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/1493 https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/1493

danielmewes 12y ago
Understood. We're planning to test with Jepsen soon. This will happen once we have implemented fully automatic failover (at the moment it still requires manual intervention, even though it's usually straight forward). We have a first working implementation, but are still working on the details. It should become ready in the next ~2 months. See the issue you mentioned https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/1493 https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/1493 for progress on this.
coffeemug 12y ago
Slava @ Rethink here. This is a great point, and we're on it! We have a Raft implementation that unfortunately didn't make it into 2.0 (these things require an enormous amount of patient testing). The implementation is designed explicitly to support robust automatic failover, no interruptions during resharding, and all the edge cases exposed in the Jepsen tests (and many issues that aren't). This should be out in a few months as we finish testing and polish, and will include the results of the Jepsen tests. (It's kind of unfortunate this didn't make it into 2.0, but distributed systems demand conservative treatment).
- sixdimensional 12y ago
  This conservative/consistent/responsible approach is one of the reasons I have faith in RethinkDB. You always seem to be taking the time to build it right and that is priceless.
- wspeirs 12y ago
  Another good one for testing distributed systems/databases is blockade: http://blockade.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ http://blockade.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

danielmewes 12y ago

Understood. We're planning to test with Jepsen soon. This will happen once we have implemented fully automatic failover (at the moment it still requires manual intervention, even though it's usually straight forward). We have a first working implementation, but are still working on the details. It should become ready in the next ~2 months. See the issue you mentioned https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/1493 https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/1493 for progress on this.

coffeemug 12y ago

Slava @ Rethink here. This is a great point, and we're on it! We have a Raft implementation that unfortunately didn't make it into 2.0 (these things require an enormous amount of patient testing). The implementation is designed explicitly to support robust automatic failover, no interruptions during resharding, and all the edge cases exposed in the Jepsen tests (and many issues that aren't). This should be out in a few months as we finish testing and polish, and will include the results of the Jepsen tests. (It's kind of unfortunate this didn't make it into 2.0, but distributed systems demand conservative treatment).

sixdimensional 12y ago
This conservative/consistent/responsible approach is one of the reasons I have faith in RethinkDB. You always seem to be taking the time to build it right and that is priceless.
wspeirs 12y ago
Another good one for testing distributed systems/databases is blockade: http://blockade.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ http://blockade.readthedocs.org/en/latest/