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This article is too technically advanced for me. As a casual MongoDB user, how do these problems affect me?



In replicated Mongo scenarios higher write volume increases the probability of inconsistent reads. What this means is that there's a chance that on some data—no matter how safely you attempt to write it—you'll end up in a totally inconsistent state for your system.

The actual impact of an inconsistent state is very hard to judge. It could be as minimal as having two different users just see something weird on their screen for a moment and then it goes away. It could even be totally avoided if your application handles inconsistent data well.

At the same time, it could also cause complete and nearly untraceable complete corruption of all data in your system. Who knows?

It'd be a bit like building a bridge using metal with a known defect. It'll probably work fine for a long time and depending on how and where that metal was used you might be alright.

Or you might have a complete structural integrity failure at any moment once stress starts ramping up and you'll just have to blame it wholesale on using bad materials.


In very rare cases, you could see confirmed writes being rolled back, or reads returning data from before a confirmed write

How these problems will actually affect you depend on your applications. It could for example allow 2 users to be created with the same email address


At several points real world scenarios are described, so just skim ahead to those.

Users could end up seeing private information in each others' accounts, for example.




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