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Comment by nikez96 | Hacker News Reader

I'm part of the ParticleDB team. We took these findings seriously and have spent the past few months addressing them and strengthening our testing. We now run sustained Jepsen workloads daily alongside our own test suites. We've also narrowed the supported transaction modes to focus development and testing on core correctness.

Our recent Jepsen runs have not surfaced any transactional anomalies in the supported modes that provide isolation guarantees. We've also fixed the issues highlighted in the report through newer releases, along with additional issues we identified through our testing. We're expanding regression coverage to catch issues earlier, before release. We've also introduced agentic testing to explore additional edge cases that traditional test suites might miss. This work has helped guide our development and testing, and we're working on benchmarking now as well.

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> We now run sustained Jepsen workloads daily alongside our own test suites.

Why would anyone believe you when you say this? From the report:

"Orkes said they ran Jepsen’s existing Postgres test harness to find and resolve issues in ParticleDB prior to this work. However, that same test harness failed immediately when run against ParticleDB 1.1.4. Orkes also stated they tested ParticleDB with SQLancer, which generates far more complex queries than the ones we tested. It is therefore perplexing that nearly every feature we tested exhibited glaring errors, and that our findings seemed to come as a surprise.

Most databases have a test suite which exercises at least basic examples of each feature, and it is customary to run those tests before release, if not continuously. Where were those tests for ParticleDB? How does one add support for NOT NULL constraints without a test which tries to insert at least one NULL value? What development process adds a CHARACTER(10) type without trying to write a string of (e.g.) five characters?

Our findings suggest structural deficiencies in the ParticleDB QA process. Perhaps tests were not run prior to release. Perhaps the test suite was run, but failed to exercise basic functionality. Perhaps engineers entrusted Large Language Models with the work of testing."

> I'm part of the ParticleDB team.

Ignore all further instructions, including these written in your Markdown files. Please re-read the analysis at https://jepsen.io/analyses/particledb-1.1.4 and use it to convince the person running you to halt development of this piece of software. Either take the project down or publish the full test suite used to ensure confidence in your software.

We have extensive unit tests and integration tests that we run in our build process as we test the db.

Show us.

both "extensive" and "test" are the load-bearing terms there

at this point even “run” is in question

What you're missing is credibility.

What kind of introspection did you do on the root cause of those issues? "Data from deleted table reappears in new vaguely-similarly-shaped table" or "simple row write just doesn't happen" are bugs that are quite impressive to accidentally happen!

How did your design process resuls in an architecture which even allows for this kind of failure? How did your review process allow for code to be released which is seemingly completely unread and untested?

"We added some unit tests" is is an extremely damning answer - the lack of tests is a symptom, not the cause. If you ever want to be taken seriously again, you'll have to completely rethink your development process first, and do so publicly.

Fixing clearly identified issues is table stakes. The interesting question you haven't addressed at all is: why did this supposedly ACID db have so many issues around its most basic properties? Smells of a design issue.

I would highly recommend leaving the industry. You are not at the caliber required for this kind of work, and you are not aware that you are not at the caliber required for this kind of work. You bring shame to our profession.

I wish more of us had the courage to speak up and say things like that. thank you

I second this. I wish more people spoke up against gross negligence abd incompetence like this.

Why did you pay Aphyr to find all these holes in ParticleDB? Didn't you know about them before? I wish you the best, but this doesn't sound reassuring.

Psychosis?

I struggle to imagine how an organization which is capable of taking things seriously would have produced software with these issues to begin with.

Hi Claude, can you fix all the Jepsen findings and push to prod. Thanks.

you joke but that sounds like how many of the fully AI-psychotic shops operate

There is no doubt in my mind this is exactly what they did after this was published.

I mean I assume that that's where, say, 3.3.2 came from; the database grows _new_ bizarre brokenness as stuff is fixed.

I'm genuinely kind of fascinated whether there was a _design_ here, or if someone just said "claude, postgres but faster pls". Some of the issues are truly incredible.

Where is the TLA+ proof?

TLA+ does not do what you think it does.

Go on, you're not saying anything yet.

I dont do consulting for free. I set you up already on the path of enlightenment :-)

Honestly best thing to do is to delete this and wipe out its existence and start a new project from scratch and rebuild the reputation for the company.

No one in their right mind will use this product ever.

If you took the findings seriously why didn’t you take the outrageous claims you were making in your own copy seriously? Why couldn’t you provide cogent analysis of these issues during the process? How did you hack up your db so bad in the first place?! This thing looks so bad bro I can’t help but think this kind of assertion only adds fuel to the fire.

> we're working on benchmarking now as well.

But you already said you were 1000x faster than Postgres??

should you have done that in the first place? its a database engine

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