Comment by isoap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by isoap | Hacker News Reader

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> Don't take shortcuts and you won't get burned.

I'm sorry that the user did something unexpected and then posted about it in a way that made your application look bad. I know that must be frustrating. However...

Calling the user out as doing something wrong when your application is failing because of a use case you can't handle properly just looks bad. You serve your users, not the other way around. Don't forget that.

If it were me and there were a case that my application couldn't handle properly, if I couldn't fix it, I'd raise an error, and then document clearly that they should not do this, such that when they search for that error, they'd find the answer. Then, I'd work to see if there were a way I could avoid the error altogether by not allowing that use case.

There is no "one size" fits all database or distributed system in existence. To say that there is is to say that MySQL is equally as well suited to all use cases as Cassandra or Redis. They all store and serve data, right?

Cassandra makes no claims to be such a holy grail. Read their documentation, and you can see the use cases it is good for and those it is not.

The author of this blog post chose one it is not good for.

Put another way, "I'm sorry that the Lamborghini you bought broke when you attempted to go off-roading with it. Perhaps you should have bought a Jeep instead?"

It's not possible to detect whether the user wants CP. You can assume they want CP, but the entire point of Cassandra is that it doesn't make that assumption.

Cassandra is AP with opt-in CP. This is an explicit tradeoff. You're giving up the assumption (which enables error checking) that everything is CP in order to get AP performance. This tradeoff is one of the main use cases for which Cassandra exists.

The vast majority of the time, error checking is way more valuable than AP performance, so your approach to handling the error makes sense, but if that's your situation you shouldn't be using Cassandra. There are a wide variety of ACID-compliant relational databases that do what you want.

TL;DR: Using Cassandra and expecting CP error checking is like using a hammer and expecting screwdriver behavior.

The high-handedness doesn't improve your argument. Consider forgoing it next time.

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