Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
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.
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.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.