Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Ah, marvelous. I've just finished reviewing a... what do the children call it? A 'blog post'... from a company named 'PlanetScale.' They proudly announce that after being "synonymous with quality, performance, and reliability," they've decided the next logical step is to offer... the exact opposite. It's a bold strategy. One might even call it an act of profound intellectual nihilism.
They declare, with a straight face I can only assume, that they are responding to requests for a tier "more accessible to builders on day 1." Builders. Not engineers. Not computer scientists. "Builders." As if they're constructing a birdhouse in their garage, not a system responsible for maintaining the integrity of actual information. And what is this revolutionary offering for these "builders"? A single node, non-HA mode.
My goodness. A single-node database. What a groundbreaking concept. It's so revolutionary, we were teaching the catastrophic downsides of it in undergraduate courses back in the 1980s. Clearly, they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on Postgres, or they'd understand that the entire architecture was designed with robustness in mind, a concept they now market as an optional, premium feature. This isn't innovation; it's devolution. It's like an automotive company bragging about reintroducing the hand-crank starter for "builders who want a more accessible ignition experience."
And the most breathtaking claim, the pièce de résistance of this whole tragicomedy, is that one can do this:
...without having to add replicas or sacrifice durability.
Without sacrificing durability? On a single node? Have the laws of physics been suspended in their particular cloud? Does their single server exist in a pocket dimension immune to hardware failure, cosmic rays, and clumsy interns with rm -rf privileges? The 'D' in ACID, my dear "builders," stands for Durability. It is a guarantee that committed transactions will survive permanently. Tying that guarantee to a single, mortal piece of hardware isn't a feature; it's a liability sold as a convenience. It's a brazen violation of the very principles that separate a database from a glorified text file.
They speak of Brewer's CAP theorem as if it were a list of suggestions. "Consistency, Availability, Partition Tolerance... pick two, unless you're a marketing department, in which case you can apparently have all three, or in this case, a new secret option: pick none!" They've thrown Availability out the window for the low, low price of $5, yet whisper sweet nothings about durability. It's astonishing.
I see the typical corporate jargon peppered throughout this missive. Startups are "bullish on their company's future," experiencing "unexpected fast growth," and need to "grow to hyper scale." Hyper scale! A term so meaningless it could only have been conceived in a meeting where no one had read a single academic paper on scalability. They position themselves as the saviors, rescuing startups from "emergency migrations," when in fact, they are now actively selling the very ticking time bomb that causes those emergencies.
It is a perfect encapsulation of the modern industry. Why bother with the foundational truths established by Codd? Why trouble yourself with the rigorous mathematical proofs underpinning relational algebra or the physical constraints of distributed systems? Just slap a slick UI on a flawed premise, invent some meaningless metrics you call "Insights," and call it a "game changer."
This isn't a product announcement. It's a confession. A confession that they believe their customers are so fundamentally ignorant of computer science principles that they can be sold a single point of failure and be convinced it's a "more approachable" form of reliability.
I must say, it's been an illuminating read. I shall now go and wash my eyes. Rest assured, I have made a note to never, ever consult this company's blog for anything remotely resembling sound engineering advice again. Splendid.