🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Ah, yes. Another dispatch from the digital trenches. One stumbles upon these blog posts with the same morbid curiosity with which one might inspect a particularly novel form of fungus. The author laments their "sluggish" PostgreSQL, a fine, upstanding relational database, as if the tool itself were at fault and not, as is invariably the case, the craftsman. The problem, you see, is not that the tools are old, but that the new generation of so-called "engineers" are allergic to reading the manuals.

Allow me to catalogue, for the edification of the uninitiated, the litany of horrors typically proposed as "solutions" to these self-inflicted wounds.

• First, they will inevitably abandon the relational model entirely, seduced by the siren song of "schema-on-read." This is a delightful euphemism for, "We had no plan and now we store unstructured garbage." They champion this regression as "flexibility," blithely discarding decades of work on normalization and data integrity. Codd must be spinning in his grave. They trade the mathematical purity of the relational algebra for a chaotic key-value store and have the audacity to call it innovation. It's as if the last fifty years of computer science were merely a suggestion.

• Next comes the breathless discovery of "Eventual Consistency." They speak of it as if it's a revolutionary feature, not a grim trade-off one is forced to make when one cannot solve a distributed consensus problem. They've reinvented the wheel, you see, and discovered it's a bit wobbly. They fundamentally misunderstand the CAP theorem, treating it not as a set of constraints to be soberly navigated, but as a menu from which they can discard the "C" for "Consistency" because it's inconvenient. I'm sure their users will appreciate their shopping cart totals being a philosophical concept rather than a reliable number.

• Then there is the cargo-cultish chanting of "Just shard it!" They take a perfectly coherent database, whose transactional integrity is its entire reason for being, and chop it into pieces with all the finesse of a dull axe. Suddenly, a simple foreign key constraint becomes a harrowing exercise in distributed transactions, which they promptly fail to implement correctly. The 'I' in ACID—Isolation—is the first casualty, swiftly followed by Atomicity. Clearly they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on the challenges of distributed database design; they just saw a diagram on a conference slide and thought it looked simple.

• Of course, no modern architectural blasphemy is complete without a byzantine network of caching layers. They'll put Redis in front of everything, treating their database not as the canonical source of truth, but as a "cold storage" bucket to be synchronized... eventually. This leads to the inevitable, panicked Slack messages:

  "Why is the user's profile showing outdated information?" Because your cache, you simpleton, is lying to you. They've solved a performance problem of their own making by creating a data integrity crisis. Brilliant.

• Finally, they will declare victory by adopting a "Serverless Database," paying a vendor an exorbitant premium for the privilege of abdicating all responsibility. They celebrate the abstraction, ignorant of the fact that they've merely outsourced their poor design choices to a black box that will happily scale their inefficiency—and their bill—to the moon. They’ve managed to create a system with no observable state, no predictable performance, and no one to blame but an opaque cloud provider. A triumph of learned helplessness.

But do carry on. It is, from an academic perspective, a fascinating anthropological study. Your boundless enthusiasm for violating first principles is, if nothing else, entertaining. Please, continue to "move fast and break things." From the looks of it, you're exceptionally good at the second part.

Oh, fantastic. Another blog post promising a silver bullet. "Branches in beta." Let me just print this out and frame it next to the "Migrate to NoSQL, it's web scale" memo from 2014 and the "Our new serverless database has infinite scalability" flyer from 2019. They'll look great together in my museum of broken promises.

"Create new branches using real production data... without impacting your production deployment."

Right. I just felt a phantom pager vibrate in my pocket. My eye is starting to twitch. You know what else was supposed to be a simple, zero-impact operation? That one time we moved from Postgres 9.6 to 11. It was just a "logical replication slot," they said. It'll be seamless, they said. I have a permanent indentation on my forehead from my desk, earned during the 72-hour incident call where we discovered the logical replication couldn't handle our write throughput and the primary database's disk filled up with WAL logs. Seamless.

But sure, let's talk about branches. Like Git, but for a multi-terabyte database that powers our entire company. What could possibly go wrong? I can already picture the Slack channels.

• 10:00 AM: A junior dev, bless his heart, creates a "branch" of the production users table to test his new onboarding flow. He calls it josh-test-branch-pls-ignore.
• 10:05 AM: He needs to test the deletion path. He runs a TRUNCATE command. He thinks he's a genius for testing on a branch.
• 10:06 AM: The C-level exec who sold us on this "revolutionary" database platform is on a conference call, boasting about our developer velocity.
• 10:07 AM: We get a page. P1: Authentication Service Latency Skyrocketing. Turns out, "creating a branch" isn't a magical, free operation. It puts a read lock on a few critical tables for just long enough to cascade into a service-wide failure. Or maybe the storage IOPS are saturated from, you know, copying all of production. Who could have possibly predicted that?

...develop and test new features without impacting your production deployment.

This line is my favorite. It has the same delusional optimism as a project manager putting "Fix all technical debt" on a sprint ticket. You're telling me that I can give every developer a full-fat, petabyte-scale copy of our most sensitive PII, and the only thing I have to worry about is them merging their half-baked schema change back into main?

Oh god, the merge. I hadn't even gotten to the merge. What does a three-way merge conflict look like on a database schema? Does the CTO's laptop just burst into flames? Do you get a Git-style conflict marker in your primary key constraint?

<<<<<<< HEAD ALTER TABLE users ADD COLUMN social_security_number VARCHAR(255); ======= ALTER TABLE users ADD COLUMN ssn_hash_DO_NOT_STORE_RAW_PII_YOU_MONSTER VARCHAR(255); >>>>>>> feature-branch-of-certain-doom

I've seen enough. I've seen the "simple" data backfills that forgot a WHERE clause. I've seen the "harmless" index creation that locked the entire accounts table for four hours on a Monday morning. I've seen a "beta" feature corrupt a transaction ID wraparound counter.

This isn't a feature; it's a footgun factory. It's a brand new, high-performance, venture-capital-funded way to get paged at 3 AM. It’s not solving problems, it's just changing the stack trace of the inevitable outage.

Thanks for the article. I'm going to go ahead and bookmark this in a folder called "Reasons to Become a Goat Farmer." I will not be reading your next post.

Ah, another dispatch from the "Cloud Native" trenches. How utterly thrilling. Percona has achieved "general availability" for their "Operator for MySQL." One must assume this is an occasion for some sort of celebration among those who believe the solution to every problem is to add another layer of abstraction and wrap it in YAML. Bravo. You've finally managed to take a perfectly functional, if somewhat pedestrian, relational database and bolt it onto the most volatile, ephemeral, and fundamentally unsuitable execution environment imaginable. It’s like watching a child put a jet engine on a unicycle. The enthusiasm is noted; the outcome is preordained.

They speak of a "Kubernetes-native approach." What, precisely, does that mean? Does it mean the database now embraces the native Kubernetes philosophy of treating its own components as disposable cattle? “Oh dear, my primary data node has been unceremoniously terminated by the scheduler to make room for a new microservice that serves cat photos. No matter! The ‘Operator’ will spin up another!” This isn't a robust architecture; it's a frantic, high-wire act performed over a chasm of data loss. They’ve built a system that is in a constant state of near-failure, and they call this resilience. It’s madness.

And the crowning jewel of this farce:

...delivering the consistency required for organizations with business continuity needs.

Consistency? Consistency? In a distributed system, running on an orchestrated network of transient containers, governed by the unforgiving laws of physics? It's as if the CAP theorem was not a foundational theorem of distributed computing, but merely a gentle suggestion they chose to ignore. They speak of "synchronous Group Replication" as if it's some magic incantation that allows them to have their cake and eat it, too. Let me be clear for the slow-witted among us: in the face of a network partition—an eventuality Kubernetes not only anticipates but actively courts—you will sacrifice either availability or consistency. There is no third option. This "synchronous" replication will grind to a halt, your application will hang, and your "business continuity" will be a Slack channel full of panicked developers. They are not delivering consistency; they are delivering a brittle system that makes a pinky-promise of consistency right up until the moment it matters most.

One is forced to conclude that they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on the fallacies of distributed computing. Or perhaps they did, and simply decided that the network is, in fact, reliable and latency is, in fact, zero. The arrogance is breathtaking. They are so preoccupied with their "Operators" and "CRDs" that they've completely lost sight of the fundamentals.

I shudder to think what has become of basic ACID properties in this chaotic ballet of pods.

• Atomicity? How can you guarantee an atomic transaction across multiple nodes when any one of them could vanish mid-commit?
• Isolation? A solved problem, but one that becomes needlessly complex when you introduce three new layers of networking indirection.
• Durability? The very letter 'D' in ACID is an affront to the Kubernetes model. Durability is writing to persistent storage. Their model is writing to something you hope is persistent before the node it's attached to is de-scheduled into the digital ether.

They have traded the mathematical purity of Codd's relational model for a flimsy, fashionable house of cards. They have forgotten the rigorous proofs and formal logic that underpin database systems, all in service of being able to write kubectl apply -f mysql-cluster.yaml.

Mark my words. This will end in tears. There will be a split-brain scenario. There will be a cascading failure that their precious "Operator" cannot untangle. A junior engineer will apply the wrong manifest file and wipe out a production dataset with a single keystroke. And on that day, they won't be reading the Percona blog for a solution; they'll be frantically searching for a dusty copy of a 1980s textbook, wondering where it all went so horribly wrong. A trifle, I suppose. Progress waits for no one, not even for correctness.

Oh, this is just wonderful. I just finished reading this delightful little update, and I must say, it's a masterclass in corporate communication. A true work of art.

I always get a thrill reading about "important upgrades," because my abacus immediately translates that from engineering-speak into its native language: unbudgeted Q4 capital expenditure. It’s so thoughtful of you to find new and innovative ways for us to funnel money into your pockets right before year-end. My bonus thanks you.

And the phrasing! "Minimize resource saturation." That’s just poetry. It’s a beautifully delicate way of saying, “The system you’ve been paying us millions for over the last three years was, in fact, an inefficient lemon, and now we’re graciously allowing you to pay us even more to fix it.” I appreciate the honesty, really. It’s refreshing. We were just over-provisioning servers for fun, anyway. We love turning cash into heat.

My absolute favorite part is the promise to "isolate failure domains." What a fantastic value proposition! Instead of the whole system going down at once—an event that is at least simple to diagnose—we now get the privilege of dealing with a complex, distributed cascade of micro-failures. This sounds like it will require an entirely new team of specialists to decipher. I can already see the invoice from the consultants you’ll “recommend.” Let’s call them the Failure Domain Isolation Sherpas. I bet they bill by the domain.

...and improve user visibility.

And the grand finale! "Improve user visibility." I can already see the new line item on the invoice. 'Visibility-as-a-Service Premium Tier'. For a modest 30% uplift, we get a new set of pie charts to show us precisely how efficiently our budget is being converted into your revenue. Truly, the gift that keeps on giving.

Let’s just do some quick, back-of-the-napkin math here on the "true cost" of this "upgrade."

• The "Upgrade License Fee," which I’m sure is a pittance, let's say $250,000.
• The mandatory "Professional Services Engagement" to ensure a "smooth transition," because heaven forbid this be a simple toggle. That’s another $150,000.
• Re-training our entire engineering team on the new "paradigms," because you've moved all the buttons. Let's budget $75,000 for that little adventure.
• The inevitable army of consultants, the aforementioned Sherpas, to fix what the Professional Services team broke. I'll pencil in a conservative $400,000.
• The "Legacy Data Model Compatibility Pack," because this upgrade will, of course, be completely incompatible with everything we've built. That's a steal at $125,000.
• And finally, the "Annual True-Up For Enhanced Consumption Metrics," which is your clever new way of billing us based on a metric no one understands but that always goes up. Let's call that an extra $200,000 per year, forever.

So this free "upgrade" to improve our system actually costs us, what, $1.2 million just to get started, with a recurring bleed of $200k? Fantastic. The ROI on this must be staggering. They'll claim we'll save millions on "reduced downtime," a number they invented in a marketing meeting. Based on my math, we'll break even right around the heat death of the universe.

This isn’t an upgrade; it’s another golden bar on the cage of vendor lock-in you’ve so expertly constructed around us. Thank you for polishing our prison.

I'm off to liquidate the employee 401(k)s to cover the first invoice. I'm sure our "improved visibility" dashboard will show a lovely chart of our descent into bankruptcy. At least it will be in real-time.

Alright, settle down, kids. Let me put down my coffee—the kind that's brewed strong enough to dissolve a floppy disk—and read this... manifesto. I swear, I’ve seen more complex logic on a punch card.

So, let me get this straight. You've discovered that there are different ways to join data. And that, get this, one way might be faster than another depending on the situation. Groundbreaking. Truly. I haven't been this shocked since they told me we could store more than 80 characters on a single line. This whole article is like watching a toddler discover his own feet and calling it a breakthrough in bipedal locomotion.

The author starts with a treatise on join algorithms like he’s cracking the Enigma code. Nested Loop joins, Hash Joins... Son, we were debating the finer points of hash bucket overflow in DB2 on a System/370 mainframe while your parents were still trying to figure out how to program a VCR. You're talking about cardinality estimates? Back in my day, we estimated cardinality by weighing the boxes of punch cards. It was more accurate than half the query planners I see today.

And this... this $lookup syntax. My god. It looks like a cat walked across a keyboard full of special characters.

{
  $lookup: {
    from: "profiles",
    localField: "profileID",
    foreignField: "ID",
    as: "profile"
  }
}

You call that a query? That's a cry for help. I’ve seen cleaner COBOL code written during a power surge. We had a keyword for this back in the 80s. It was elegant, simple, powerful. It was called LEFT JOIN. Maybe you've heard of it.

The author then runs a test on a dataset so small I could probably fit it on a single reel of magnetic tape. Twenty-six users and four profiles. He then "scales it up" by cloning the same records 10,000 times. That’s not scaling, that’s just hitting CTRL+C/CTRL+V until your finger gets tired. It tells you nothing about real-world data distribution. It's like testing a battleship by seeing if it floats in a bathtub.

And the big reveal!

• Discovery #1: The Indexed Loop Join. You're telling me that if you create an index, the database... uses it? And that looking up a key in an index is faster than scanning the whole damn table for every single row? Hold the phone! Someone alert the press! I remember waiting six hours for an index to build on a multi-gigabyte table, listening to the DASD platters scream, just so the nightly batch job wouldn't take until next Thursday. And you're presenting "use an index" as some kind of advanced optimization technique.

• Discovery #2: The Hash Join. You found that if the lookup table is small, it's faster to load it into memory and build a hash table than to repeatedly scan the disk. Welcome to 1985, kid. We called that a good idea then, and it's still a good idea now. It's not a revolutionary HashJoin strategy, it's just... common sense. The only difference is our "in-memory hash table" was limited to 640K of RAM and we had to pray it didn't spill over into the space reserved for the operating system.

And my absolute favorite part:

Unlike SQL databases, where the optimizer makes all decisions but can also lead to surprises, MongoDB shifts responsibility to developers.

Let me translate that for you from corporate-speak into English: "Our query optimizer is dumber than a bag of hammers, so it's your problem now. We're calling this developer empowerment."

This isn't a feature. This is you doing the job the database is supposed to be doing for you. You have to "design your schema with join performance in mind," "understand your data," "test different strategies," and "measure performance." You've just perfectly described the job of a Database Administrator. A job that these NoSQL systems were supposed to make obsolete. Congratulations, you've reinvented my career, only you've made it more tedious and given it a worse title.

So when you hear someone say "joins are slow," maybe the real problem isn't the join. Maybe it's that you're using a glorified document shredder that makes you manually reassemble the pieces, and then you write a blog post bragging about the predictable performance of using staples instead of glue.

You haven't found some new paradigm. You've just taken a forty-year-old concept, slapped a JSON wrapper on it, and sold it back to a generation that thinks a database schema is a form of oppression. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some tapes to rotate. They aren't "web-scale," but at least they work.

Ah, yes. Just what I needed to see on a Tuesday morning. Another promise of a magical, self-service future. I have to applaud the optimism here, I really do. It’s truly inspiring.

The ability to horizontally scale a cluster "independently and without a support ticket" is a bold, beautiful vision. It's the kind of feature that makes you feel trusted. It says, "We have so much faith in our complex, distributed state-management logic that we're putting the big, red 'rebalance the entire production cluster' button right in your hands. What could possibly go wrong?"

I absolutely love that this will be done without a support ticket. It’s so efficient. It means that when the process inevitably gets stuck at 98% complete during our Black Friday traffic peak, I won't have to waste time filing a ticket. Instead, I can spend that quality time frantically trying to decipher opaque service logs while my on-call PagerDuty alert screams into the void. This is the kind of empowerment I've been looking for.

And the migration itself, I'm sure it will be seamless. The term "zero-downtime" isn't used here, but its spirit is implied, hovering like a benevolent ghost. I'm already preparing for the “brief period of increased latency” that somehow translates to a complete write-lock on the primary coordinator node. Or my favorite, the node that gets partitioned during the handoff and decides it's a new primary, leading to a delightful split-brain scenario. These are the character-building exercises that we in operations live for.

My only real question is about monitoring. I'm sure there will be a rich and detailed set of metrics to observe this delicate process. I can already picture the dashboard: a single metric, cluster.scaling.in_progress, that flips from 0 to 1 and then, maybe, eventually, back to 0. No progress percentage, no data-to-be-moved counter, no ETA. Just pure, unadulterated suspense. It’s a bold choice to treat database administration like a Hitchcock film.

I can see it now. It’ll be 3 AM on Labor Day weekend. A well-meaning junior engineer, empowered by this new "no ticket needed" philosophy, will decide to add a few nodes to handle the upcoming holiday sale. The process will kick off, the single metric will flip to 1, and then… silence. The cluster will be in a state of perpetual re-shuffling. Writes will start failing with cryptic "cluster is reconfiguring" errors. And I'll be there, staring at a perfectly green monitoring dashboard, because of course the new scaling module doesn't hook into the main health checks.

It reminds me of the sticker on my laptop for "HyperGridDB," right next to the one from "VolaKV." They also promised a one-click, self-healing cluster. They sent us some great swag. The company doesn't exist anymore, but the sticker serves as a beautiful reminder of ambitious promises. I’ve already cleared a spot for this one.

So, bravo. Truly. It takes a special kind of courage to automate something this complex and hand the keys over. I look forward to the "early access." I'll be the one filing the P0 ticket three hours after your documentation assured me I wouldn't have to.

...another day, another database. Time to go update my resume. Just in case.

Ah, yes. Another insightful technical deep-dive from a vendor. I do so appreciate when they take the time to show us, in painstaking detail, how their new feature is finally catching up to the competition’s baseline from several years ago. It’s a wonderful use of our engineering team’s time to read, and my time to dissect the budget implications.

It’s particularly heart-warming to see such a spirit of collaboration in the industry. AWS contributing to an extension originally from Microsoft, donated to a foundation, all to improve their own product that emulates another company’s API. It's a technological turducken. I can already see the support ticket chain. When something breaks, do we call Seattle, Redmond, or a very confused project manager at the Linux Foundation? I should probably just pencil in a budget line for all three, plus a retainer for a therapist who specializes in multi-vendor PTSD.

The author’s enthusiasm for the "new query planner" is truly infectious. I was on the edge of my seat reading about the heroic journey from plannerVersion: 1, which performed about as well as an Oracle database running on a Commodore 64, to the revolutionary plannerVersion: 2, which... performs as expected. Scanning 2,000 documents to find 10 is an impressive feat of inefficiency. It's comforting to know we were paying full price for the beta version this whole time. I'll have my assistant draft a request for a retroactive discount. I'm sure that will go over well.

But let's not get lost in the weeds of totalKeysExamined. That's Monopoly money. I prefer to work with actual money. Let's do some simple, back-of-the-napkin math on the "true" cost of this wonderful upgrade.

• Initial Migration & Onboarding: Let's be conservative and say moving our current workload to DocumentDB and training the team on its... quirks... costs a mere $150,000 in engineering hours and lost productivity.
• The "Consultant Swarm" Phase 1: Realizing plannerVersion: 1 is burning through our read IOPS like a college student with their first credit card, we'd inevitably have to hire "DocumentDB Optimization Specialists." At $400/hour for a team of three, over six months, that's a cool $720,000 to work around the vendor's own sub-optimal planner.
• The "Forced Upgrade" Migration: Now, we have to migrate again to get this shiny new planner, or even better, to the PostgreSQL extension they "plan to migrate to." That means more planning, more downtime, more testing. Another $200,000, easily.
• The "Consultant Swarm" Phase 2: Of course, the new system will have its own special brand of undocumented features. We'll need the specialists back to "leverage the new paradigm." Let's pencil in another $500,000 for their invaluable PowerPoints.
• Vendor Lock-in Premium: The cost of being stuck on a proprietary emulation of an open-source API, making it astronomically expensive to ever leave. We'll call this a recurring "Insurance" fee of $1M annually against them changing the roadmap again.

So, the "true" cost to enjoy this 28-millisecond query improvement isn't just our AWS bill. It's a $2.57 Million capital expenditure, plus a million a year in operational anxiety. The ROI on this is simply staggering. For that price, I could hire an army of interns to find those 10 documents by hand.

The author's conclusion is my favorite part. It’s a masterclass in understatement.

Since AWS implemented those improvements into the Amazon DocumentDB query planner and announced in parallel that they will contribute to the DocumentDB extension for PostgreSQL, we hope that they will do the same for it in the future.

"Hope." Wonderful. We're moving from a line item to a prayer circle. Hope is not a financial strategy. It's what you have left when you’ve signed a three-year contract based on a blog post.

It’s a compelling argument for paying a premium for a copy, only to then pay consultants and engineers millions more for it to become a better copy. Truly innovative. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go approve a purchase order for a new abacus. It seems to have a more predictable TCO.

Alright team, huddle up. The marketing department just forwarded me another blog post full of sunshine and promises, this time about Aurora Global Database. As the guy whose pager is surgically attached to my hip, let me translate this masterpiece for you from my collection of vendor stickers for databases that no longer exist.

• First, they hit us with the big one: "minimal downtime." This is my favorite corporate euphemism. It's the same "minimal downtime" we were promised during that last "seamless" patch, which somehow took down our entire authentication service for 45 minutes because nobody told the application connection pool about the "seamless" DNS flip. Our definitions of "minimal" seem to differ. To them, it's a few dropped packets. To me, it's the exact length of time it takes for a P1 ticket to hit my boss's inbox.

• They claim you can create this mirror environment with "just a few steps." Sure. In the same way that landing on the moon is "just a few steps" after you've already built the rocket. They always forget the pre-steps: the three weeks of IAM policy debugging, the network ACLs that mysteriously block replication traffic, and discovering the one critical service that was hard-coded to the blue environment's endpoint by an intern three years ago.

• I love the confidence in this "fully managed staging (green) environment mirroring the existing production." A mirror, huh? More like one of those funhouse mirrors. It looks the same until you get close and realize everything is slightly warped. I'm already picturing the switchover on Memorial Day weekend. We'll flip the switch, and for five glorious seconds, everything will look perfect. Then we'll discover that a sub-millisecond replication lag was just enough to lose a batch of 10,000 transactions, and I'll get to explain the concept of "eventual consistency" to the finance department.

…including the primary and its associated secondary regions of the Global Database.

• Oh, this is my favorite part. It’s not just one magic button anymore. It’s a series of magic buttons that have to be pressed in perfect, cross-continental harmony. What could possibly go wrong orchestrating a state change across three continents at 3 AM? I'm sure the failover logic is flawless when the primary in Virginia succeeds but the secondary in Ireland hangs, leaving our global database in a state of quantum superposition. It’s both live and dead until someone opens the box. That someone will be me.

• And of course, not a single word about how we're supposed to monitor this beautiful, transient green environment. Are my existing alarms just supposed to magically discover this new, parallel universe? I can guarantee our dashboards will show a sea of green for the blue environment, right up until the moment we switch over and the real production environment—the one with no monitoring configured—promptly catches fire. The first alert we’ll get is from Twitter. It always is.

Go ahead, print out the announcement. It’ll look great on the server rack, right next to my sticker for RethinkDB.

Ah, another dispatch from the front lines. It's always a pleasure to see Kyle's latest work. It’s like getting a beautifully rendered architectural blueprint of a train wreck in progress. A real artist.

He talks about getting an "intuitive feeling for what a system is doing." I remember that feeling. It was less intuition and more a cold, creeping dread that usually started around 3 AM the night before a big launch. You'd stare at the Grafana dashboards, which were all green of course, because the health checks only pinged /status and didn't, you know, actually check the data.

And this output, this is just a masterpiece of corporate doublespeak translated into code.

:lost-count 287249, :acknowledged-count 529369,

Oh, I remember these meetings. The project manager would stand up, point to the acknowledged-count and say, "Look at that throughput! We're knocking it out of the park!" while the one quiet engineer in the back who actually read the logs would just sink lower and lower in their chair. Half the data is gone, but the number of "acknowledgements" is high, so it's a success! We'll just call the lost data a "cache eviction event" in the press release. The three "recovered" writes are my favorite. They're not bugs, they're miracles. Spontaneous data resurrection. It's a feature we should have charged more for.

This new plot is just fantastic. A visual testament to the sheer, unadulterated chaos we called a "roadmap."

From this, we can see that data loss occurred in two large chunks, starting near a file-corruption operation at roughly 65 seconds and running until the end of the test.

I see it too. That first big chunk of red? That looks exactly like the time Dave from marketing tripped over the network cable to the primary, right after we'd pushed the "optimized" consensus protocol that skipped a few fsyncs to win a benchmark. The second chunk looks like the frantic scramble to "fix" it, which only corrupted the backups. It's not a diagnostic tool; it's a Rorschach test for engineering PTSD.

And the detail here is just exquisite.

• Single-pixel dots for the "OK" and "lost" operations. Sure, let's just treat total data loss with the same visual weight as success. Very egalitarian.
• Bigger crosses for the "infrequent operations" which are "often of the most interest." Yes, the moments where the system is so confused it can’t even decide how it failed. Those are the ones that get you promoted to "Lead Architect of Special Projects," a title that means you're not allowed to touch production code anymore.

He says, "this isn't a good plot yet," because he's "running out of colors." Of course you're running out of colors. There are only so many ways to paint a dumpster fire. We had more categories of failure than the marketing department had buzzwords. There was "data loss," "data corruption," "data that got stuck in the wrong data center and achieved sentience," and my personal favorite, "eventual consistency with the void."

He's calling them "op color plots" for now. How wonderfully sterile. At my old shop, we had a name for charts like this too. We called them "Performance Improvement Plan generators."

It’s a beautiful way to visualize a system lying to you at 6,800 records per second. Bravo.

Oh, this is just fantastic. Starting a technical deep-dive on database internals with a quote about being lazy is a level of self-awareness I never thought I'd see from this company. Truly, a masterstroke. It brings back so many fond memories of Q3 planning meetings. “I’m lazy when I’m designin’ the schema, I’m lazy when I’m runnin’ the tests…” It’s practically the company anthem.

I’m so excited to see you’re finally comparing lock handling with PostgreSQL. It takes real courage to put your own, shall we say, unique implementation of MVCC up against something that… well, something that generally works as documented. I’m sure this will be a completely fair and unbiased comparison, performed on hardware specifically chosen to highlight the strengths of your architecture and definitely not run on a five-year-old laptop for the PostgreSQL side of things. Can’t wait for the benchmarks that prove your "next-generation, lock-free mechanism" is 800% faster on a workload that only ever occurs in your marketing one-pagers.

It’s just so refreshing to see the official, public-facing explanation for how all this is supposed to work. I remember a slightly different version being explained with a lot more panic on a whiteboard at 2 a.m. after the "Great Global Outage of '22." But this version, the one for the blog, is much cleaner. It wisely omits the parts about:

• The transaction ID wraparound problem we were told was "a theoretical edge case" until it took down our largest customer.
• The "snapshot isolation" that occasionally wasn't quite so isolated. Whoops!
• That one "temporary" fix in the vacuuming process from three years ago that the entire storage engine now depends on like a load-bearing Jenga block.

I particularly admire the confidence it takes to write a whole series on concurrency control when I know for a fact that the internal wiki page titled "Understanding Our Locking Model" is just a link to a single engineer's Slack status that says "Ask Dave (DO NOT PING AFTER 5 PM)."

While preparing a blog post to compare how PostgreSQL and MySQL handle locks, as part of a series covering the different approaches to MVCC...

It's this kind of ambitious, forward-thinking content that really sets you apart. It reminds me of the old roadmap. You know, the one with "AI-Powered Autonomous Indexing" and "Infinite, Zero-Cost Scaling" slated for the quarter right after we finally fixed the bug where the database would sometimes just… stop accepting writes. Classic. It's not about delivering what you promise; it's about the audacity of the promise itself.

Anyway, this was a real treat. A beautiful piece of technical fiction. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I can now confidently say I have a complete understanding of the topic and will never need to read this blog again. Cheers