> ParticleDB’s home page advertised that ParticleDB was “formally proven” with a TLA+ proof.

Perhaps they meant formerly, probably just a speech to text problem

-https://github.com/jepsen-io/particledb is currently 404 (probably still private?)-

EDIT: It's up now

> We present 96 issues in ParticleDB, ranging from the pedestrian (crashes, deadlocks, data loss, etc.) to the piquant (partially-invisible rows which could not be deleted, WHERE 4 = 5, dropped tables re-emerging in distorted forms, confused columns, strings turning into integers, and so on).

Definitely seems worse than usual (looking back most databases seem to have <10 issues total, and the majority seem "mild") - since it's a database for AI was it also likely vibe-coded or just new? Then again even if new, I wouldn't expect so many issues in a stable release

Slop DB written in Rust. They probably changed the landing page after the bad results, you can still see the old one: https://web.archive.org/web/20260518203012/https://particled...

"Written in Rust · Formally Verified · PostgreSQL Compatible"

Brutal!

> ParticleDB 1.1.4 claimed to be a Postgres-compatible database ... Instead, we found a library of confusion

> exhibited frequent, profound transactional anomalies in essentially every way we could measure. We routinely observed the loss of committed writes, internal consistency violations, G1a (Aborted Read), G1b (Intermediate Read), and P4 (Lost Update). In the append workload, successfully appended values would routinely disappear from later reads of a given key. Our test suite inferred every kind of cyclic anomaly including G0, G1c, G-Single, and G2-item, but many of these can be attributed to more basic issues, like write loss. These issues occurred with a single server and without faults, and affected every transaction mode, interface, and WAL mode tested

Aphyr does great work, Jepsen always kicks it out of the park :)

Is/was ParticleDB open source? There is a Github link on their website, however the only public repo in their org seems to be the Golang client library.

Since the library claims to be postgres compatible, I wonder if its developers ran the existing postgres jepsen suite against it (possibly with some adjustments). Or why not.

Especially now, where you could probably just ask AI to adapt the existing suites to the cosnistency claims this database makes, and get something useful out of it. While certainly not as good as a professional test, I'd expect it to at least find some low hanging fruits before going for the expensive and public official Jepsen test.

Fatality

It’s wild how bad it is. Not surprising for a vibecoded database, but why did they hire Kyle for a test, instead of first doing ANY testing themselves?