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Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4

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Re: Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4

#141

Post by bdangubic »

icedchai wrote: post #140
shivasaxena wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't confined just to senior developers. I have even encountered system architects who were clueless about Isolation levels. Some even confused "Consistency" in ACID with the "Consistency" in CAP. Makes me sad, since I work mostly in retail and and encounter systems that are infested with race conditions and simila errors: things where these isolation levels would be of great help. However it's mostly engineers…

In over 25+ years at various companies, I only recall one interview where isolation levels were even discussed. Almost nobody cares until it's a problem.

we must have had entirely different careers, same in years and 180 degrees opposite, absolute core (and disqualifying) questions at every interview, no exceptions.

Re: Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4

#142

Post by whazor »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #136
havkom wrote: post #107

Good investigation! Software developers nowadays barely know about transactions, and definitely not about different transaction models (in my experience). I have even encountered "senior developers" (who are actually so called "CRUD developers"), who are clueless about database transactions.. In reality, transactions and transaction models matter a lot to performance and error free code (at least when you have volume…

Soon most software devs will just be transcribing LLM trash to code with no concept of what's actually happening (its actually required at shopify now - MS is bragging 1/3rd of their software is written this way), and no new engineers are coming up because why invest the time to learn if there won't be any engineering jobs left?

I think that this is really the duality of LLMs. I can ask it to explain different database transaction models and it would perfectly explain to me how it works, which one to pick, and how to apply it.

But generated code by a LLM will likely also have bugs that could be fixed with transactions.

Re: Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4

#143

Post by Mawr »

sgarland wrote: post #123
hliyan wrote: post #102

I wish more writing in the software world was done this way: "Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) service which provides managed instances of the PostgreSQL database. We show that Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL multi-AZ clusters violate Snapshot Isolation, the strongest consistency model supported across all endpoints. Healthy clusters occasionally allow..." Direct, to-the-point, unembellished and an…

A company I was at had an internal blog where anyone could write an article, and others could comment on it. Zero requirement to do so, and it in no way factored into your rating. I think it was the result of a hackathon one year. Anyway, I really enjoyed it, because I like technical writing. I found that if I wrote a deeply technical post, I’d get very few likes and comments – in fact, I even had a Staff Eng tell me…

The reason for that outcome was likely two-fold:

1. If your memes were analogies to the dry technical concepts, then the simple, easy to digest analogies were the key here, not the memes themselves.

2. Pictures are worth a thousand words. The more visual you can make your writing the better. Even something as simple as using bullet points instead of dense paragraphs of text works wonders. But the key is to use graphs and illustrations to explain and show concepts wherever possible.

Re: Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4

#144

Post by icedchai »

bdangubic wrote: post #141
icedchai wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In over 25+ years at various companies, I only recall one interview where isolation levels were even discussed. Almost nobody cares until it's a problem.

we must have had entirely different careers, same in years and 180 degrees opposite, absolute core (and disqualifying) questions at every interview, no exceptions.

Possibly. Most of my career has been at startups or smaller companies where database fundamentals were severely lacking.

Re: Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4

#145

Post by selcuka »

icedchai wrote: post #144
bdangubic wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we must have had entirely different careers, same in years and 180 degrees opposite, absolute core (and disqualifying) questions at every interview, no exceptions.

Possibly. Most of my career has been at startups or smaller companies where database fundamentals were severely lacking.

One "enterprise" HR product I had to interact with stored all its data in a single MS SQL Server table, with hundreds of columns. It was basically a spreadsheet based system with an SQL interface. This was more than a decade ago, but still.

Re: Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4

#146

Post by fulafel »

baq wrote: post #96

> This work was performed independently by Jepsen, without compensation not what a RDBMS stakeholder wants to wake up to on the best of days. I'd imagine there were a couple emails expressing concern internally. hats off to aphyr as usual.

I'd think anynone on the receiving end should be thrilled. Traditionally nobody survives Jepsen unscathed but getting it from Aphyr means you're being taken seriously.

Re: Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4

#147

Post by belter »

havkom wrote: post #107

Good investigation! Software developers nowadays barely know about transactions, and definitely not about different transaction models (in my experience). I have even encountered "senior developers" (who are actually so called "CRUD developers"), who are clueless about database transactions.. In reality, transactions and transaction models matter a lot to performance and error free code (at least when you have volume…

Besides the obvious shocking statement that people can be gainfully working in this industry, without knowing about database transactions...I will take a guess...they have been using web scale MongoDB ?

Re: Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4

#148

Post by jacobsenscott »

whazor wrote: post #142
jacobsenscott wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soon most software devs will just be transcribing LLM trash to code with no concept of what's actually happening (its actually required at shopify now - MS is bragging 1/3rd of their software is written this way), and no new engineers are coming up because why invest the time to learn if there won't be any engineering jobs left?

I think that this is really the duality of LLMs. I can ask it to explain different database transaction models and it would perfectly explain to me how it works, which one to pick, and how to apply it. But generated code by a LLM will likely also have bugs that could be fixed with transactions.

That's because it's glorified search. The postgres docs tell you that without risk of hallucination. You are correct that it won't produce code that does the right thing in that context though.

Re: Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4

#149

Post by icedchai »

selcuka wrote: post #145
icedchai wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly. Most of my career has been at startups or smaller companies where database fundamentals were severely lacking.

One "enterprise" HR product I had to interact with stored all its data in a single MS SQL Server table, with hundreds of columns. It was basically a spreadsheet based system with an SQL interface. This was more than a decade ago, but still.

About 20 years ago, I worked at a startup where one of the guys had built his own ORM. It was never clear why. Internally, it didn't use prepared statements, and instead used some custom escaping logic that was full of bugs. We'd regularly get SQL injection issues in production.
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