Source: Jepsen technical evaluation report published October 31, 2026, by Kyle Kingsbury, titled 'Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4'.
Built by Orkes to replace Redis and PostgreSQL within its Conductor workflow engine, ParticleDB claimed orders-of-magnitude performance advantages while guaranteeing strict transactional safety. Jepsen's independent investigation, funded by Orkes under Jepsen's standard ethics policy, subjected the single-node storage engine to rigorous consistency verification suites, evaluating SQL query execution, transaction isolation, and Write-Ahead Log (WAL) durability across three sync tactics: sync, groupsync, and nosync.
The findings revealed pervasive breakdowns across basic relational invariants. Among the 96 documented issues, Jepsen identified instances of ghost rows that were partially invisible yet impossible to delete, dropped database tables re-emerging in distorted shapes, strings mutating into integers during storage, and query planner errors where contradictory filter expressions such as WHERE 4 = 5 successfully matched table records. Most significantly, committed transactions vanished under standard concurrent execution without introducing node crashes or simulated power failures.
While Orkes resolved 86 of the documented issues throughout iterative testing reaching version 1.1.18.11.rc-22, core transactional guarantees remained breached. In tests modeling read-write registers, ParticleDB allowed Lost Updates under its highest serializable isolation tier and lost committed write transactions under default OCC mode. Orkes claims full remediation in subsequent release candidate 1.1.19-rc.13.