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I was/am a fan of duckdb, but I recently discovered a bug in 0.9.1 where a fairly innocuous query was silently returning wrong results (issue 9399 on github). That made me much less confident about duckdb and how well tested it is. Maybe it was a one off, but with postgresql for example I don't think I personally encountered cases of simply incorrect query results.


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Just had a look (https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/issues/9399). Yeah it's worrying that such a trivial query returned incorrect results - but credit to the Devs for getting it fixed quickly.

To my knowledge the only databases that can be described as "military-grade" in terms of testing are SQLite and Postgres.


Apparently DuckDB requires your real-life name to file an online bug report, bucking every norm of online handles for communication, as well as enabling doxxers and stalkers to find and trace people in real life.

It's the same with a lot of open source contributions; those need to do so for legal and copyright reasons.

If you're afraid of doxxing and / or stalking though, at least you have the choice to not contribute. You can still post somewhere else and ask someone else to make the report for you if need be.


I'm not aware of any other open source project that required a real name just to file a bug

Yes, that was a surprising requirement when submitting a bug report. (I understand patches may need to be like that due to copyright issues)

This is stupid and [the given reasoning](https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/anonymous-help/) makes no sense. If you post open source software and open issues for it, and I post a properly formatted, reproducible, clear issue, there is absolutely no reason for me to disclose my identity for the sake of your ego.

I looked at the bug report form and for context it links to a post “Dear anonymous internet user asking for help” https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/anonymous-help/

It seems to be about wanting to know who you're talking to when providing free support for an open-source project, and whether the person submitting an issue is using the project for personal use or within an organization.

> If I don’t know who you are, am I enabling you to build the new Turkish censorship infrastructure, or helping you implement [Russian internet blocking] more efficiently? These are two examples that actually happened by the way.


What about Oracle and MSSQL? I'd imagine that especially the former would be "military-grade" (whatever that entails)

Even Postgres has its share of the bugs, e.g. simple search shows https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAGckUK2GLF%3Dd9J5ErEW...

Oracle might be military grade because they have the entire web page on how to report wrong results bugs: https://support.oracle.com/knowledge/Oracle%20Cloud/150895_1... https://support.oracle.com/knowledge/Oracle%20Database%20Pro... etc.

Query engines are (not)surprisingly complex software products. Add to that the constant (and aggressive, due to the competition in the field) evolution and adition of the new features that can interact with every existing feature in any existing context and you have a perfect environment for bugs to appear.


I'm not sure if the fix is reassuring or not: https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/pull/9411/files

I certainly liked that the added the problematic query to the list of tests, which I think is a healthy sign.

Almost(!) every single query engine has bugs like this. The fact is that DuckDB is version 0.9.1 (pre 1.0) so bugs are kind of expected. I have found bugs like this in commercial engines.

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