Aviation isn't perfect; nothing implemented by large groups of fallible humans with budget constraints will be. But it has one of the best safety track records of any industry.
Now, why won't aviation style engineering be applied in other fields, like databases? Well, because no one really cares enough. No one dies if some random database used by some ad platform loses the occasional transaction. Yeah, it's frustrating to engineers who are trying to build reliable systems, but in the grand scheme of things losing a few percent of transactions isn't the end of the world for most businesses.
You get safety cultures like that in aviation because there are real, substantial risks, so you need to have thorough engineering discipline, properly designed redundancy, etc.
For databases that are used for the majority of the business world, efficiency is generally a bigger concern than correctness; they'd rather have cheap and fast databases that lose a few transactions occasionally than something that actually provides consistency. But of course everyone thinks they need consistency, so it's advertised as a selling point while not actually being provided in practice.
> For databases that are used for the majority of the business world, efficiency is generally a bigger concern than correctness; they'd rather have cheap and fast databases that lose a few transactions occasionally than something that actually provides consistency
'majority' is a strong claim. Any figures to back it up?
I'm positive people want their databases to be correct. There are databases which promise great speed in return for occasionally losing bits of your data, and they get very little use outside of special uses.
lambda|2 years ago
Yes, there are misses, but they have been happening increasingly less frequently over time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#/media/File:Fa...
Aviation isn't perfect; nothing implemented by large groups of fallible humans with budget constraints will be. But it has one of the best safety track records of any industry.
Now, why won't aviation style engineering be applied in other fields, like databases? Well, because no one really cares enough. No one dies if some random database used by some ad platform loses the occasional transaction. Yeah, it's frustrating to engineers who are trying to build reliable systems, but in the grand scheme of things losing a few percent of transactions isn't the end of the world for most businesses.
You get safety cultures like that in aviation because there are real, substantial risks, so you need to have thorough engineering discipline, properly designed redundancy, etc.
For databases that are used for the majority of the business world, efficiency is generally a bigger concern than correctness; they'd rather have cheap and fast databases that lose a few transactions occasionally than something that actually provides consistency. But of course everyone thinks they need consistency, so it's advertised as a selling point while not actually being provided in practice.
_a_a_a_|2 years ago
'majority' is a strong claim. Any figures to back it up?
CJefferson|2 years ago
skyde|2 years ago
dallasg3|2 years ago
myk9001|2 years ago