🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

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