Yeah that’s basically it. It really is a wonderful piece of free software that was (and still is) way ahead of its time in many ways.
They basically made a ton of good architectural decisions really early on and then just nailed down the details super tight over many years.
Their technique of running cluster-wide recoveries to handle failures is a great example. Most distributed systems engineers find the idea of designing a database that becomes unavailable (even for a few seconds) when a single node is lost completely appalling, but it turns out this small trade off leads to massive simplifications elsewhere and the resulting system is net/net much more reliable than anything else I’ve ever seen.
They basically made a ton of good architectural decisions really early on and then just nailed down the details super tight over many years.
Their technique of running cluster-wide recoveries to handle failures is a great example. Most distributed systems engineers find the idea of designing a database that becomes unavailable (even for a few seconds) when a single node is lost completely appalling, but it turns out this small trade off leads to massive simplifications elsewhere and the resulting system is net/net much more reliable than anything else I’ve ever seen.