[moonpolysoft]

Sharding puts you in the same risk category as any other distributed database. Just ask the engineers and ops people at twitter, foursquare, and any number of other web companies that have dealt with sharded databases at scale. Also: sharding is eventually consistent, except you don't get any distributed counter primitives to help figure out which replica is telling the truth.

[jhugg]

There's a difference between what ops people see and what developers see. If the ops people have the same headache no matter what, why force the developers to think about consistency?

[benblack]

Good question! The answer is that the "If..." evaluates to false: ops (and by that I hope you mean something more than facilities staff) has a far simpler set of problems with which to deal when the software is designed, implemented, and tested in accordance with physical constraints. I, too, would like a gold-plated, unicorn pony that can fly faster than light, but in the mean time, I'm writing and using software that produces fewer operational and business headaches. Some of that includes eventually consistent databases.

[jhugg]

I totally concede that most consistent databases at scale are crap on the ops people.

I would echo Mike's argument and claim that a nice ops story and true consistency are not totally orthogonal. There are a lot of practical reasons why the big database vendors have boiled their frogs and ended up where they are today.

VoltDB certainly isn't the realization of that dream, so I'll put my money where my mouth is and spend the next few years helping it get there.