# ParticleDB

6 Hacker News commenters recommended ParticleDB and 53 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 2 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended for claimed speed and a redesigned engine after a Jepsen report; the most common caveat is that critics doubt the fixes and say QA is missing.

## Why people recommend it

- Claims reported issues fixed in newer releases (2 comments): "The engine has since been redesigned and all of these issues have been fixed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50318395)) "We've also fixed the issues highlighted in the report through newer releases" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319275))

## What people warn about

- Claimed fixes don't hold up (5 comments): "Given how bad your LLM was at bugfixing in the releases tested by Jepsen, I would expect the redesigned version to bring back all those bugs and then some." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50328044)) "Makes you wonder if they asked their agent to formally prove it with TLA+ and it just responded that it had performed the proofing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50324170)) "This is like paying for a pentest of a treehouse, and claiming that this implies the updated treehouse with a working padlock" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50318497))
- No visible tests or QA (4 comments): "Either take the project down or publish the full test suite used to ensure confidence in your software." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320239)) "A codebase with that many fundamental issues suggests either no integration tests were written" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50318841)) "Imagine bringing in any outside testing before your WHERE implementation works." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50321625))
- Basic crashes, deadlocks, data loss (4 comments): "We present 96 issues in ParticleDB, ranging from the pedestrian (crashes, deadlocks, data loss, etc.)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50317862)) "none of those builds should have seen the light of day, given all the problems that were found" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320882)) "The database was so janky that it sounds like most of the time was spent on basic bugs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50318520))
- Team lacks engineering competence (3 comments): "I struggle to imagine how an organization which is capable of taking things seriously would have produced software with these issues to begin with." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50322847)) "after reading this I would never touch a piece of software built by anyone involved with this" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319536)) "they lack the judgement and engineering competence to credibly provide a database server" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320830))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [PostgreSQL](https://hackerapproved.com/p/postgresql.md): 816 recommend
- [MySQL](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mysql.md): 124 recommend
- [Microsoft SQL Server](https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-sql-server.md): 73 recommend
- [Microsoft Access](https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-access.md): 62 recommend
- [Turso](https://hackerapproved.com/p/turso.md): 53 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "ParticleDB", https://hackerapproved.com/p/particledb/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).