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Comment by tibbar | Hacker News Reader

The submitted title buries the lede: RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4 does not properly implement snapshot isolation.

Folks on HN are often upset with the titles of Jepsen reports, so perhaps a little more context is in order. Jepsen reports are usually the product of a long collaboration with a client. Clients often have strong feelings about how the report is titled--is it too harsh on the system, or too favorable? Does it capture the most meaningful of the dozen-odd issues we found? Is it fair, in the sense that Jepsen aims to be an honest broker of database safety findings? How will it be interpreted in ten years when people link to it routinely, but the findings no longer apply to recent versions? The resulting discussions can be, ah, vigorous.

The way I've threaded this needle, after several frustrating attempts, is to have a policy of titling all reports "Jepsen: <system> <version>". HN is of course welcome to choose their own link text if they prefer a more descriptive, or colorful, phrase. :-)

Given that author and submitter (and commenter!) are all the same person I think we can go with your choice :)

The fact that the thread is high on HN, plus the GP comment is high in the thread, plus that the audience knows how interesting Jepsen reports get, should be enough to convey the needful.

long time lurker here who registered on HN many years ago after reading Jepsen: Cassandra

the Jepsen writeups will surely stand the test of time thank you!

And your comment also...In Multi-AZ clusters.

Well this is from Kyle Kingsbury, the Chuck Norris of transactional guarantees. AWS has to reply or clarify, even if only seems to apply to Multi-AZ Clusters. Those are one of the two possibilities for RDS with Postgres. Multi-AZ deployments can have one standby or two standby DB instances and this is for the two standby DB instances. [1]

They make no such promises in their documentation. Their 5494 pages manual on RDS hardly mentions isolation or serializable except in documentation of parameters for the different engines.

Nothing on global read consistency for Multi-AZ clusters because why should they.... :-) They talk about semi-synchronous replication so the writer waits for one standby to confirm log record, but the two readers can be on different snapshots?

[1] - "New Amazon RDS for MySQL & PostgreSQL Multi-AZ Deployment Option: Improved Write Performance & Faster Failover" - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-rds-multi-az-db-clus...

[2] - "Amazon RDS Multi-AZ with two readable standbys: Under the hood" - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/amazon-rds-multi-az-wi...

> They make no such promises in their documentation. Their 5494 pages manual on RDS hardly mentions isolation or serializable

Well, as a user, I wish they would mention it though. If I migrate to RDS with multi-AZ after coming from plain Postgres (which documents snapshot isolation as a feature), I would probably want to know how the two differ.

I emailed the mods and asked them to change it to this phrase copy-pasted from the linked article:

> Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL multi-AZ clusters violate Snapshot Isolation

(The mods replied above; thank you!)

Par for the course

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