While I agree that we're not talking about huge write volume in the grand scheme of things, and I definitely agree with you that Bedrock should pay aphyr to run this through Jepsen (particularly with their new replication strategy--see some of my concerns below), Expensify's overall transaction volume is probably close to the limit of what 95% of businesses are ever going to see, they have contractual latency and availability requirements they have to fulfill that are also probably more stringent than 95% of businesses are ever going to see, and they've been doing it with a single master database (no partitioning) and a single writer on that master. I think it's useful information that SQLite works for them, because it means SQLite would work fine for most people and (as is evidenced by this thread) a lot of people don't think SQLite can work for a site like Expensify.
And seeing actual numbers are important, too. People often act like in terms of write volume you're either shared hosting fodder, or you're Facebook, but there's a lot of room in between, and a lot of HA workloads are very read-dominated. It's very hard to find information about the businesses fall in the middle of that spectrum because usually no technology company talks about its traffic unless it's bragging about it (and then will release only vague information that could be spun in lots of different ways--for instance, not to call you out, I have no clue what "HA" means in your context, whether you need distributed transactions, whether the writes are cleanly partitionable, what isolation level you need, what your latency requirements are, or what the read:write ratio looks like). So I'd rather encourage people to release their numbers than poo-poo them because they aren't as big as whatever the biggest system you've worked on is.
My point is that if they are advertising rock solid distributed data, I don't think they have achieved that without putting it through some more paces.
I agree, actual numbers are great.
We also agree, jespen is great.
But I am saying, another path, to a similar level of confidence jespen provides, is some real critical stress testing.
Sure, it will be out of the scope of what most people need, but it will give them the confidence to say "rock solid distributed data".
And seeing actual numbers are important, too. People often act like in terms of write volume you're either shared hosting fodder, or you're Facebook, but there's a lot of room in between, and a lot of HA workloads are very read-dominated. It's very hard to find information about the businesses fall in the middle of that spectrum because usually no technology company talks about its traffic unless it's bragging about it (and then will release only vague information that could be spun in lots of different ways--for instance, not to call you out, I have no clue what "HA" means in your context, whether you need distributed transactions, whether the writes are cleanly partitionable, what isolation level you need, what your latency requirements are, or what the read:write ratio looks like). So I'd rather encourage people to release their numbers than poo-poo them because they aren't as big as whatever the biggest system you've worked on is.