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Comment by petrosagg

> Sure, we’re not yet injecting storage faults, but then formal proofs for protocols like Raft and Paxos assume that disks are perfect, and depend on this for correctness? After all, you can always run your database over RAID, right? Right? > If your distributed database was designed before 2018, you probably couldn’t have done much. The research didn’t exist.

I'm trying to understand this part but something seems off. It seems to imply that those proofs do not apply to the real world because disks are not perfect, but neither is RAM. The hardware for both RAM and disks has an inherent error rate which can be brought down to arbitrary levels by using error correction codes (e.g ECC RAM).

I'm assuming that the TigerBeetle correctness proofs are predicated on perfect RAM even though in reality there is a small probability of errors. This tells me that there is an error rate which they consider negligible. If that's the case what is the difference between:

* TigerBeetle's storage approach

* Paxos or Raft with enough error correction on disk writes that the probability of errors equals that of ECC RAM which is considered negligible

I've probably made a logical error in my reasoning but I can't see it. Can someone enlighten me?

parent petrosagg 3 years ago

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