CouchDB Notice for 1.0.1 - Potential Data Loss

http://couchdb.apache.org/notice/1.0.1.html

by amock • 16 years ago

74 32 16 years ago

couchdb.apache.org

couchdb• 16 years ago

I should make clear that the notice is titled "Notice for 1.0.1" because the 1.0.1 release (due this week) will contain the fix. The bug is confined to 1.0.0.

freetard4• 16 years ago

I hope next time Damien will think twice before insulting other databases for having similar issues:

https://twitter.com/damienkatz/status/15444148375

mattculbreth• 16 years ago

Good find--I was going to look for it myself.

StavrosK8• 16 years ago

As I saw the tweet I became uneasy, followed the link and, sure enough, it's my post he's referencing. That's a bit disconcerting, I feel responsible for trashing MongoDB all over the internet. At least my conscience is lighter because everything I wrote was true...

jchrisa2• 16 years ago

fwiw, the only error Damien made was failing to review some patches other people wrote. Also, this issues is much less serious than the Mongo problems as it's A) localized and B) fixed. Eg it's a bug not a design decision.

whyme• 16 years ago

So much for relaxing.

Devilboy• 16 years ago

Sounds like they were a bit too relaxed on the code reviews.

coffeemug• 16 years ago

Critical bugs are a question of statistics. As the size of the code-base increases, the probability that there is a critical bug in it quickly approaches one. Who would dare say that millions of lines of core Oracle code do not have at least five obscure bugs that cause data loss in some situations?

Aaronontheweb2• 16 years ago

There's always going to be some edge case that escaped test coverage or some use case that totally escaped the imaginations of developers in any product. The chances of such an error being discovered is probably a function of the total number of active application instances and some rough measure of complexity in the application's implementation. So yeah, I'd say generally speaking you're right on.

Aaronontheweb2• 16 years ago

RavenDB seems like a cool document DB option for .NET / Windows devs - has anyone tried it?

http://www.ravendb.net/

rcoder• 16 years ago

Does anyone else find it interesting that the actual underlying bug causing this data loss is related to what seems to amount to a stateful variable? I.e., the "reference to [a] timer is kept in the updater state", and the actual bug being a process which "never cleared the timer reference".

I think this might suggest an additional criteria for extra code review scrutiny in systems (like CouchDB) that are built in functional langages: any code that "feels" stateful or procedural should probably be examined with additional care, as it is the most likely to contain exactly this classic sort of stateful logic error.

CouchDB Notice for 1.0.1 - Potential Data Loss

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