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Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by semiquaver on Saturday October 31, 2026 @02:14PM (#50318500)
https://github.com/particledbai/jepsen/issues/18 is utterly humiliating. I can’t believe they kept going after getting that report. I would die of shame.

(Edit for clarity: this is quoted from the linked article)

  You could write predicates over non-existent columns:

  root=> SELECT * FROM t
         WHERE definitely_not_a_column = 4;
   a | b
  ---+----
   4 | 5
  (1 row)
  Or ask if 4 = 5

  root=> SELECT * FROM t WHERE 4 = 5;
   a | b
  ---+----
   5 | 6
  (1 row)


Good on them for being good sports I guess, but after reading this I would never touch a piece of software built by anyone involved with this company. The sheer hubris of their claims combined with the specific reality of their broken garbage software (with the contradicted marketing claims and hallucinated documentation) is literally breathtaking.

It must have been darkly amusing to see all these defect tickets coming in, only for them to frantically shovel each one to increasingly overworked LLM agents to apply pig-lipstick while the humans in charge oh-so-slowly start to realize their software quality is not quite what their glazing agents had been telling them and that what they have on their hands is basically sub-mongo-quality slop. What a world we live in, huh?

Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by mrkeen on Saturday October 31, 2026 @03:59PM (#50319536)
I won't push back on it being garbage, but I would suggest that if enough people did it that way it would be the new normal, and apologists would fall out of the woodwork, e.g. [1]

I complain that mainstream SQL engines have no problem returning less than the total number of rows if you first query WHERE column = NULL and then query WHERE column <> NULL. Your example queries remind me of that.

[1] https://medium.com/dailyjs/the-why-behind-the-wat-an-explana...

Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by semiquaver on Saturday October 31, 2026 @04:10PM (#50319647)

  > WHERE column = NULL and then query WHERE column <> NULL
Well, yeah? NULL by definition is not equal to anything. so both parts of that statement don’t have any meaning. Did you mean to write this?

   WHERE column IS NULL and then query WHERE column IS NOT NULL
Otherwise you’re just arguing against 3VL semantics. NULL means what it means and is conceptually foundational to SQL.
Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by mrkeen on Saturday October 31, 2026 @05:42PM (#50320531)
Hi apologist. How was the woodwork? Your exact comment was why I wrote mine.

  You could write predicates over non-existent columns:

  root=> SELECT * FROM t
         WHERE definitely_not_a_column = 4;
Cool, definitely_not_a_column doesn't exist, so therefore that whole WHERE clause doesn't exist either, so the real query is SELECT FROM t.

  SELECT * FROM t WHERE 4 = 5;
   a | b
  ---+----
   5 | 6
  (1 row)
We're comparing 4 and 5. Precedent?

  System.out.println(((Integer)4).compareTo((Integer)5));
  > -1
What happens when you treat -1 as a bool? The following languages agree that -1 is true: C, C++, JS, Python, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Lua, R.

So it's SELECT FROM t WHERE true;

Now, let's get busy blaming Jepsen for using the tool wrong.

Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by debugnik on Saturday October 31, 2026 @05:58PM (#50320653)
> therefore that whole WHERE clause doesn't exist either

No, therefore the condition is unsatisfiable and equivalent to WHERE FALSE. And that's letting you ignore the SQL spec, which says the query is invalid and should return "Column not found" because the column name cannot be resolved.

> We're comparing 4 and 5. Precedent?

I really hope you're trolling, for your own sake.

Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by mrkeen on Sunday November 01, 2026 @01:23AM (#50323158)
The explanation is more damning than the devex.

The condition is unsatisfiable, and the engine went ahead and gave a 0-warning result?

Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by semiquaver on Saturday October 31, 2026 @09:12PM (#50321847)
Apologist for what?
Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by IChrisI on Sunday November 01, 2026 @01:51AM (#50323035)
Are you claiming that 4 = 5?
Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by mrkeen on Sunday November 01, 2026 @01:10AM (#50323108)
I'm claiming that

1) It would be no more fucked up than anything else that has been grandfathered into our tools.

2) If it already had mass adoption in the market, people would jump onto this thread to explain to me that I just don't understand the brilliant semantics behind language of why 4 = 5.

Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by semiquaver on Monday November 02, 2026 @09:10AM (#50337026)
I spent more time than I’d like to admit trying to understand your comments here. I’m convinced you are a very odd person with a confused mind.

Brilliant semantics? No one said anything normative. You’re arguing with yourself on your own non-sequitur. SQL is SQL. It’s extremely flawed but who freaking cares, that’s why ParticleDB shouldn’t have tried to implement SQL let alone full postgres compatibility when they clearly are not equipped to do so! Your comments about how strange and non-intuitive SQL are true but irrelevant.

Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by AtlasBarfed on Saturday October 31, 2026 @09:46PM (#50322024)
Are we talking Oracle null or ansi null? I'm just being sarcastic and I don't actually remember all the fed up s** Oracle did
Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by Kwpolska on Sunday November 01, 2026 @01:17PM (#50328123)
Oracle's weird null behaviour is that there is no empty string, so ('' IS NULL) is a true statement in Oracle.
Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by semiquaver on Sunday November 01, 2026 @05:03PM (#50330401)
That is weird, good to know!
Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by CodesInChaos on Saturday October 31, 2026 @04:28PM (#50319819)
I am rather receptive to the argument that SQL is a fractal of bad design. But complaining that SQL engines implement well known SQL semantics according to spec is silly.
Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by mrkeen on Sunday November 01, 2026 @01:15AM (#50323134)
"SQL engines implement well known SQL semantics"

That's why I preplied:

> if enough people did it that way it would be the new normal, and apologists would fall out of the woodwork

If 4=5 made it into the spec, would it be no longer up for criticism?

Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by doctorpangloss on Sunday November 01, 2026 @07:51AM (#50325164)
it's unfortunate that you are getting downvoted for having an actual conversation rather than just piling on these guys. but there are also a lot of places where people have said "everyone is using LLMs" and also "this thing about the job being requirements is a myth, because lots of requirements are ridiculous" has also been said, so i don't know. what do people want? a lot of these bullshit startups to fail, which is funny, but it's not good.
Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by semiquaver on Monday November 02, 2026 @09:13AM (#50337090)
They’re really not having an actual conversation. You’re mistaking unnecessary argumentativeness for something more than it is.
Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by rsynnott on Monday November 02, 2026 @05:58AM (#50335281)
> I won't push back on it being garbage, but I would suggest that if enough people did it that way it would be the new normal, and apologists would fall out of the woodwork

No. No-one would ever accept a database with _this_ level of brokenness. Like, this makes early Mongo and noughties-era mysql look _amazing_.

> I complain that mainstream SQL engines have no problem returning less than the total number of rows if you first query WHERE column = NULL and then query WHERE column <> NULL.

You may not like it, but that is entirely deliberate and internally consistent. Blame the people who came up with SQL in the 70s; far too late to change it now.

Re:Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4 by semiquaver on Saturday October 31, 2026 @03:22PM (#50319199)
Sorry to reply to my own comment but they are also lying when they claim to pay top of market on https://orkes.io/careers

$180K in CA for someone who reports directly to the head of engineering is not even top of market for Topeka, KS.