What bothers me more than anything was Aerospike felt the need to compare a benchmark done on an in-memory dataset directly with a Cassandra benchmark on dataset that was many fold larger into disk. They made this comparison and said "look! Aerospike is x times faster than Cassandra!"
That was the end of giving a shit for me. When people feel they need to lie to convince you of something, that is when I know that I don't want what they want.
Incidentally, that is also how I stopped caring about politics.
2) Yes, marketing claims are BS. If this was a reason to not use something, we'd have to stop using pretty much every other commercial piece of software we have. That's why we test and run software in our environment, and there... aerospike works. Really well. Even with network partitions. So I can understand kyle's tests in this post and the reasoning and results but there's still a big gap between this testing and the reality our company has experienced.
Which is what I at least have indeed opted to do; I avoid commercial software like the plague for this very reason, using it only when there isn't an alternative (like when it's a legacy system that has to be interfaced with). There are plenty of free software projects that don't make outrageous marketing claims and - therefore - aren't nearly as susceptible to disappointment and wasted money.
Aerospike's claims border on the realm of false advertising (if they don't actually classify as false advertising, which is a big "if"; the claim of 100% uptime is dubious at best and more likely to be an outright-malicious lie). Why should they get my money?
Some of them will fail in a way that keeps your data safe, others will fail in a way that preserves uptime but gives you temporarily inconsistent data. Aerospike apparently does neither. Why is it unreasonable to expect them not to falsely claim otherwise?
The "crazy revelation" for me was not that Aerospike's software is, like everything else, subject to the CAP theorem. It's that they apparently think it's awesome to claim that it isn't, and charge tens of thousands of dollars for their product on that justification.