Recently my attention was brought to this bug which is a nightmare bug for any consultant.
Working with production systems we assume reads are reads and if we’re just reading we can’t break anything. OK may be we can crash the server with some select query which runs into some bug but not cause the data loss.
This case teaches us things can be different – reads can in fact cause certain writes (updates) inside which add risk, such as exposed by this bug.
This is why transparency is important – to understand how safe something is it is not enough to know what is this logically but also what really happens inside and so what can go wrong.
