[mmalone]

Er, no. I'm just not differentiating between the various reasons why a single node may be unavailable. It doesn't really matter _why_ the node is unavailable... it just is.

FWIW, databases like Cassandra expose the consistency tradeoff to the client. You can do quorum reads/writes with Cassandra. You can't with MySQL or PostgreSQL.

Edit: you can choose between quorum reads/writes and stronger or weaker consistency levels with Cassandra, but can't with MySQL / PostgreSQL.

[justinsb]

I'm not going to treat a cosmic ray corrupting one single network packet the same way I treat a hurricane cutting off power to a datacenter for 2 weeks. I do see the intellectual appeal in doing so, but we'll just have to agree to disagree!

[mmalone]

Uhm, of course they're not the same thing... but they have the same effect. The point is that the system remains available even if a node becomes unavailable for _whatever_ reason. I'm not sure what you're disagreeing on... There are common and uncommon modes of failure. Of course we should prioritize handling the common ones. But if we can handle all of them at once that's ideal. And, as I said in an earlier comment, when you're doing a million operations a second, failures that are one-in-a-million happen every second.