NewSQL databases fail to guarantee consistency and I blame Spanner
&gt;<i>Systems that guarantee consistency only experience a necessary reduction in availability in the event of a network partition. As networks become more redundant, partitions become an increasingly rare event. And even if there is a partition, it is still possible for the majority partition to be available</i><p>In my experience, yes network partitions are incredibly rare. However 99% of my distributed ststem partitions have little do with the network. When running databases on a cloud environment network partitions can occur for a variety of reasons that don’t actually include the network link between databases:<p>1. The host database is written in a GC’d language and experiences a pathological GC pause.<p>2. The Virtual machine is migrated and experiences a pathological pause<p>3. Google migrates your machine with local SSDs, fucks up that process and you lose all your data on that machine (you do have backups right?)<p>4. AWS retires your instance and you need to reboot your VM.<p>You may never see these issue if you are running a 3 or 5 cluster database. I began seeing issues like this semi regularly once the cluster grew to 30-40 machines (Cassandra). Now I will agree that none of the issues took down majority, but if your R=3, it really only takes an unlucky partition to fuck up an entire shard