Jepsen finds 96 bugs in ParticleDB, including data loss and type confusion
Testing of Orkes' AI database revealed critical flaws in ACID guarantees, though most were fixed by version 1.1.18.
What to know
- Jepsen found 96 critical issues in ParticleDB versions 1.1.4–1.1.18, including data loss and type confusion, contradicting its "Full ACID" claims.
- Most bugs manifested on single-node deployments with minimal configuration, and most were fixed by version 1.1.18—but committed write loss and anomalies persisted in default and strongest transaction modes.
- Orkes, which funded the testing, released version 1.1.19-rc.13 claiming to resolve all remaining issues, though independent verification is pending.
Jepsen Database testing and analysis firmOrkes Creator of ParticleDB database
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlesposts
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Orkes releases ParticleDB 1.1.19-rc.13 claiming to fix remaining issues
In response to Jepsen's findings, Orkes released version 1.1.19-rc.13 and claims it resolves all remaining issues discussed in the report. The research was funded by Orkes and conducted according to Jepsen's ethics policy.
“ParticleDB's claims of "Full ACID" were somewhat premature.”
— Jepsen · source -
2 outlets Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4
first by HN Best, 11d ago · also HN Frontpage
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As a general guideline I avoid Hacker News, but someone linked me comments from people who worked at Orkes, maker of ParticleDB, in the thread about the devastating Jepsen review of their software ( https:// jepsen.io/analyses/particledb- 1.1.4 if you haven’t seen it). So I clicked and read the comments, then skimmed the rest of the thread, and I…
2 more of the top 3 · 81 posts in this stretch
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This is the most devastating Jepsen report I've ever read, and I will personally be hammering the entirety of section 4.5 ("LLM Tradeoffs") to our company doors. Too many good quotes to pull, but this from section 4.3 is perhaps the most emblematic: >Most databases have a test suite which exercises at least basic examples of each feature, and it…
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https://github.com/particledbai/jepsen/issues/18 is utterly humiliating. I can’t believe they kept going after getting that report. I would die of shame.(Edit for clarity: this is quoted from the linked article) You could write predicates over non-existent columns: root=> SELECT * FROM t WHERE definitely_not_a_column = 4; a | b ---+---- 4 | 5 (1…
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background
Jepsen publishes ParticleDB analysis: 96 issues found across versions 1.1.4–1.1.18 — Jepsen's testing revealed 96 bugs in ParticleDB, Orkes' multi-model database for AI workloads. Issues ranged from pedestrian failures (crashes, deadlocks, data loss) to strange anomalies (partially-invisible rows, WHERE 4 = 5, confused columns, type confusion). Most issues occurred on single server with single client and no faults. By version 1.1.18.11.rc-22, all but ten issues were resolved, though the default occ transaction mode continued losing committed writes and the strongest serializable setting allowed internal anomalies and Lost Update.
What people are saying 21 voices from 4 sites · best of 81 · verbatim
- Nov 4
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"Delightfully" "titillating" "These are excellent questions—which we do not know the answer to. Pressing on" "we found a library of confusion." What a takedown of a database here: https:// jepsen.io/analyses/particledb- 1.1.4 By way of https:// cosocial.ca/@mhoye/11754948958 7157214
- Nov 2
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Reading the Jepsen analysis of ParticleDB is like watching a vivisection. An autopsy that happens to also be a murder. https:// jepsen.io/analyses/particledb- 1.1.4
- Nov 1
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For most codebases in the past, you had a select few within a company who truly understood everything that was going on - why things were they way they are, why we should or shouldn't do things in certain ways, and what broke and got fixed in the past. All that institutional knowledge went out the door with AI. By PM metrics, developers could ship…
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I was originally just going to flag this comment as off-topic and move on, but then I thought better of it. So: I don't normally read Hacker News, but someone linked me comments made by the Orkes people over there, so I clicked through. And then I skimmed the rest of the thread. And I wasn't surprised by what I saw there, though I was a little…
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To this point--I do a fair bit of consulting for products that are still in their early stages. A lot of that is unpublished, but the Redis-raft and Capela reports are both on pre-release systems. I've found that phase of engagement can be fantastically productive--we can shake out bugs rapidly and give the team a regression test suite that they…
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Before LLM coding agents, it was quite possible for companies in high-income countries to apply the same basic approach to programming: a high-wage software engineer or product manager could hand off issues to an outsourcing company that would randomly assign them to one of many software engineers in a low-wage country. Nonetheless, even companies…
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"More broadly, the use of LLMs erodes trust in documentation, in software, and in the organizations which produce them. Perhaps engineers will begin to treat any new software project with suspicion—the signals we used to rely on as markers of a mature system are now easier to counterfeit." https:// jepsen.io/analyses/particledb- 1.1.4
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the most polite evisceration i have seen this year: jepsen report on particledb “database” . and they have been paid by the subject of the report!
- Oct 31
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The thing is everyone uses AI, maybe 1% of developers don't use it in October 2026. I think it's more they didn't know what they were doing with a database. A good engineer today can build anything in their field and work way faster than ever before, it's facts. Like it or not. If you don't see it, you're behind and living under a rock. Good…
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I do not know in what order Kyle et al. wrote the report, but as I progressed through different parts I think I could detect instances of an increasingly fatigued/disheartened/unhinged tone--without compromising the professionalism we expect from Jepsen analyses, of course. These moments of humanity brought me joy.More cynically, I suspect that…
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Jepsen analysis of a vibe-coded database: https:// jepsen.io/analyses/particledb- 1.1.4 . I knew their clients couldn't indefinitely block publication of a Jepsen report, but it's good to see it demonstrated again. "ParticleDB was a fractal of correctness errors. [...] ParticleDB claimed to be “1087x faster than PostgreSQL”. In our tests…
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I’ve come to learn an interesting dichotomy in software:Some software is correct by construction, in the sense that the overall design makes sense and the cases that don’t work are generally local bugs.Some software is incorrect by construction, and it tends to work by some combination of luck and by carefully working around the incorrect design…
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I'm part of the ParticleDB team. We took these findings seriously and have spent the past few months addressing them and strengthening our testing. We now run sustained Jepsen workloads daily alongside our own test suites. We've also narrowed the supported transaction modes to focus development and testing on core correctness.Our recent Jepsen…
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Note that [the previous Jepsen report](https://jepsen.io/analyses/orkes-conductor-5.3.2) last week was for different (less broken) software from the same supplier. Since ParticleDB is intended to support Conductor, it makes sense that a full examination of Conductor should also cover ParticleDB; and since Conductor can use alternative databases…
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Brutal!> ParticleDB 1.1.4 claimed to be a Postgres-compatible database ... Instead, we found a library of confusion> exhibited frequent, profound transactional anomalies in essentially every way we could measure. We routinely observed the loss of committed writes, internal consistency violations, G1a (Aborted Read), G1b (Intermediate Read), and P4…
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> We present 96 issues in ParticleDB, ranging from the pedestrian (crashes, deadlocks, data loss, etc.) to the piquant (partially-invisible rows which could not be deleted, WHERE 4 = 5, dropped tables re-emerging in distorted forms, confused columns, strings turning into integers, and so on).Definitely seems worse than usual (looking back most…
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I asked about this too, hoping to discuss it in the report. FWIW, I ran the same Postgres Jepsen test against ParticleDB--it took a little bit to get it to set up the database and connect, but once it did, it started screaming about every possible kind of safety violation. I'm not sure how they got it to pass!
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I would have thought that given a test suite, agents would probably not claim a bug was fixed when the test still failed. However, Orkes was able to run the generative test suite I was writing through this process, and we had to go back and forth several times on bugs which were supposedly fixed but weren't. Part of that might just be normal human…
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> Jepsen recommends users halt further deployment of ParticleDB and migrate to other databases as soon as possible. That seems like the right conclusion, wow. I have to wonder what leads a database developer to hiring Jepsen without first doing even fairly basic testing of their own database. Though I guess in this case it was probably "the LLM…
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Sure, DST would have been helpful in finding bugs. Even basic manual QA would have been helpful! Most of these issues just required starting a fresh node and typing a handful of SQL queries into the shell. Understanding a bug is different than finding one. To understand the cause of a bug, you probably need to read some of the code involved, or at…
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When does 4 = 5? Why would strings become 8-bit integers? And how could an SQL table have rows with different columns? We don't know, but it's fun to imagine! The latest # Jepsen report covers 96 issues in ParticleDB, Orkes' multi-model database built for and with AI. https:// jepsen.io/analyses/particledb- 1.1.4