Not your main point, but MongoDB didn't commission Kyle to do that report as they had in the past, he did it on his own time. That's why his report doesn't mention repeat testing. They do actually run his tests in their CI and those new tests were used to isolate that specific bug. Moreover, some of the complaints about weak durability defaults for writing were later fixed: https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/default-majority-write-con.... They still do default to a weak read concern, but writes are fully durable unless you specifically change the behavior. For what it's worth I agree with Kyle that they should have stronger defaults, but I don't really see a problem with MongoDB's response to the report because there is room to disagree on that.
Do you have a source for this? I got the impression at the time that there was some commissioning of his services, but that they didn't like the report. But he publishes work, and released the report, which forced them to deal with it.
Every distributed tech fails when he test it, but the tenor and nature of the report for MongoDB was different. It basically said between the lines "do not use this product".
MongoDB has a history of really crappy persistence decisions and silently failed writes, and as soon as it gets publicized saying "we fixed it in the next release". The same thing happened here of course. I simply don't trust the software or the company.
Mysql has the same annoying pattern in its history, although I have more confidence in the software because of the sheer number of users.
Still, I would probably pick PostgreSQL for both relation and document stores.
Source for which claim? Kyle was paid for work testing 3.4.0-rc3[1] and 3.6.4[2] which analyzed single document concurrency in a sharded configuration. Those tests run in their CI [3]. MongoDB had some somewhat misleading copy on their website about the result of those tests, so Kyle decided to test the new multi-document transactions feature for 4.2.6 and found some bugs.
It's fair to not trust the database or company, I don't blame you for that. But I think Kyle's MongoDB 4.2.6 report was not nearly as concerning as his PostgreSQL 12.3 report which found serializability bugs in a single instance configuration, among other surprising behaviors. MongoDB's bugs were at least in a new feature in a sharded configuration. I don't think his most recent report was actually as negative as it may read to you. I say this as someone who mostly runs PostgreSQL, by the way!
As a side note I believe there are consistency bugs existing right now in both MongoDB and PostgreSQL (and MySQL and Cassandra and Cockroachdb and...) waiting to be discovered. I'm a jaded distributed systems operator :)
