[ztorkelson]

Thank you for sharing your perspective!

My argument is not that such controls can't be reasoned about and applied to great effect. Rather, my argument is that having to do so is much more difficult, time consuming, and error prone than not.

Perhaps it's just a difference of domain, but in my experience, there's real value to be had by a DBMS which doesn't require a team of trained and highly-disciplined "data engineers" to use effectively. Organizations are composed of individuals with varying levels of skill and areas of expertise, but even if everyone was both interested in and capable of building correctly functioning distributed applications under weak consistency models, I'd still prefer a database system which relieves those individuals from having to do so themselves.

As I recall, Google came to the same realization, which helped motivate Spanner. They found that their highly capable engineers were spending a significant amount of time and effort working around the weaker consistency of Spanner's predecessors, to varying degrees of success. By developing Spanner, they were able to eliminate large swaths of application complexity, freeing up their software engineers to focus more on the inherent complexity of their business domain, rather than the incidental complexity of their chosen database.

YMMV.