Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Ah, a "trip report." I love these. It’s got all the hallmarks of a vendor bake-off whitepaper disguised as a family vacation. You spend a week evaluating four over-priced, legacy solutions, each with its own bizarre set of non-negotiable "features," and then write a blog post acting like you've discovered some fundamental truth. You didn't. You just picked the one whose sales pitch annoyed you the least.
The best part is right at the beginning: hacking together a Python script to "snipe cancellations." I see you. That’s the same energy as the while true; do curl... script some junior dev writes to poll a broken API endpoint because the vendor swore "webhooks are on the roadmap." I can already picture the post-mortem: that script will inevitably get stuck in a loop, exhaust the connection pool, and bring down the entire registration system at 3 AM on Labor Day weekend while you’re trying to enjoy your one day off. Peak operational excellence.
And this whole "holistic review process"? It’s the "synergy" and "cloud-native paradigm shift" of academia. It’s a meaningless phrase designed to hide the fact that the underlying architecture is a mess of cron jobs and spreadsheets, and the decision-making process is completely arbitrary. At least with the old system, you just had to pass the load test.
Let's break down the vendors you reviewed:
First up, Yale. The on-prem, legacy mainframe. It's got the brand recognition, but the user experience is miserable. The "cathedrals" are the impressive sales decks, but the "old, dark, and smelly" CS building is the actual server room nobody’s dared to touch since 1998 for fear of unplugging something critical. And that story about the library fire suppression? "...oxygen would be sucked out to save the books, even at the expense of people inside." That is the most beautifully deranged Disaster Recovery plan I have ever heard. It’s the enterprise equivalent of "we don't test our backups, but we're pretty sure they work." It's a myth, you say? Of course it is. Just like zero-downtime migrations.
Then you get to Brown, the shiny new NoSQL database. The "open curriculum" is their killer feature—it's schemaless! You can do "CS mixed with theater"! It’s the ultimate in flexibility, until you realize nobody enforced any standards and now you have 700 different data models for what should be a "user" object. They're all about "collaboration" and "risk-taking." This part sent a chill down my spine:
If you fail a class, it doesn't show up on your transcript. This way students are encouraged to take risks...
That’s not a feature, that’s a bug report I’d file as P0-critical. That's "eventual consistency" stretched to its absolute breaking point. It’s a promise that data loss is not only possible, but encouraged for the sake of "innovation." I can hear the pitch now: "Don't worry about data integrity, just ship it! The failed writes won't even show up in the logs!" I'm sure their CS grads earn the most one year out; they have to, to pay for the therapy they'll need after their first on-call rotation.
Princeton is Oracle, obviously. It’s all about "tradition," prestige, and impenetrable rituals ("dining clubs") that cost a fortune and provide no discernible value. The tour guide sounds like an enterprise account executive who spends more time talking about their golf handicap and the company's glorious history than the actual product specs. You don’t choose Princeton; your CIO plays golf with their CIO and the decision is made for you.
And finally, UPenn. The scrappy startup that promises to "move fast and break things." It's pragmatic, it’s got that "Philly Hustle," and its most famous graduates are a case study in ethical corner-cutting. The food trucks are the ecosystem of third-party plugins you need to bolt on just to get basic functionality, because they were too busy "hustling" to build a proper admin UI.
So you ranked them and declared the whole ecosystem "overrated." Welcome to my Tuesday. Every single one of them coasting on a reputation from a bygone era, desperately needing to adapt. I've got a drawer full of vendor stickers—MongoDB, Couchbase, RethinkDB—all of them were the "Brown" of their day, promising a revolution. Most of them are just memories now, collecting dust next to my pager.
Thanks for the write-up. I will be cheerfully archiving this under "things to never read again."