Much respect for both Antirez and Aphyr.<p>I keep thinking Antirez is being forced into these problems by community pressure, though. There seems to be a lot of effort going into trying to make Redis some kind of super-featured distributed mothership of a database when we already know that it's not going to be possible.<p>Antirez and the community have put in an incredible amount of effort to create a datastore that is exceedingly good at what it does, probably best-in-class. To start asking for a distributed system with more guarantees than it was fundamentally designed for is unreasonable. The WAIT command, like every other command in Redis, was written to serve one purpose and do it well in bounded time. I expect that purpose was chosen keeping in mind what was possible without completely demolishing the current Redis architecture. If we can build a reliably distributed system using it, that's fine, but I don't think we ought to be demanding it this way.
That's a glimpse of an alternate universe where technology choices were backed by actual proof. Well done Kyle Kingsbury.
Moreover, all his Jepsen series are a great writeup on distributed DB theory and issues, and nurture an healthy skepticism to the wild claims DB authors/vendors throw around.<p><a href="http://aphyr.com/tags/Jepsen" rel="nofollow">http://aphyr.com/tags/Jepsen</a>
I love Redis and have a ton of respect for him, his accomplishments, and what he's given the community. I now how a ton of respect for someone else. We all make tradeoffs. Redis is great at what it does. I will use it for that.