Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, I put down my coffee—which is older than some of the 'engineers' on this floor—and gave this a read. It's really something. A genuine piece of work.
It's just wonderful to see the youngsters finally discovering the importance of measurable business outcomes. For a while there, I thought they were just racking up AWS bills to see who could make the prettiest dashboard. Back in my day, the only "business outcome" we measured was whether the nightly batch job finished before the CEO got in. If it didn't, the outcome was a new job posting. Simpler times.
And this strategy they've laid out... it's a thing of beauty. Bold. Revolutionary. Let me see if I've got this straight:
a strategy that included executive ownership, high-quality data, and workflow integration.
Wow. Just... wow. To think that all this time, we could have been succeeding if only we had gotten executives to own things, used good data instead of bad data, and made our programs talk to each other. It’s a miracle we ever managed to process payroll with COBOL and a prayer. We used to call "workflow integration" carrying a 20-pound tape reel from the Honeywell machine to the IBM mainframe across the computer room. I guess clicking a button in a web UI is a bit more streamlined. Good for them.
This whole ElasticGPT and AI Assistant thing is impressive, too. It's like a crystal ball for your data. We had something similar back in '85 running on an AS/400. It was a series of DB2 stored procedures chained together with some truly unholy CL scripts. It would look at query patterns and try to pre-fetch data. Mostly, it just fell over, but the idea was there. It's heartening to see these concepts finally mature after only four decades. They grow up so fast.
I am particularly moved by their focus on high-quality data. We never thought of that. We just fed punch cards into the reader and hoped janitor hadn't spilled his Tab on stack C-14. If a card was bent, that was your "data quality issue," and you fixed it by un-bending it. Seeing it treated as a foundational pillar of a corporate strategy is, frankly, inspiring.
The whole thing reminds me of the time we lost the master payroll tape for a bank. The backup? In a box in the trunk of my supervisor's Ford Fairmont. That was our "off-site recovery plan." We spent 36 hours straight restoring that data, one record at a time, with the company president watching us through a window. That's what I call executive ownership. He "owned" our souls for a day and a half. I bet these new tools would have just hallucinated the payroll numbers and called it a synergy. Progress.
I'm sure this will all work out splendidly for them. This whole "generative AI" thing is built on a rock-solid foundation, not at all like a house of cards on a wobbly table. I predict a future of unparalleled success and efficiency, right up until the AI Assistant confidently tells the support team to defragment the production database during business hours because it "read a blog post from 1998."
Now if you'll excuse me, I see a junior dev trying to query a terabyte of data without a WHERE clause. Some things never change.