Jepsen Finds 96 Consistency Issues in ParticleDB 1.1.4

• Jepsen identified 96 issues in ParticleDB 1.1.4 to 1.1.18.11.rc-22, concluding the database's "Full ACID" claim was premature.
• Most bugs occurred on a single server with a single client and no faults, including lost writes, internal anomalies, and SQL standard violations.
• Orkes claims all remaining issues are resolved in 1.1.19-rc.13.

Key Findings

• Single-node tests exposed severe consistency failures, including G-Single violations and lost writes in occ and serializable modes.
• Fault injection revealed total data loss from misdirected reads/writes and data corruption from WAL bitflips.
• Basic SQL operations failed, such as joins between integer and real columns, and updates creating "zombie" rows that could not be deleted.

Context and Implications

• ParticleDB is a multi-model database developed by Orkes for its Conductor workflow orchestration platform.
• The research was funded by Orkes, Inc., and conducted in accordance with the Jepsen ethics policy.