🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

(Rick squints at the screen, a half-empty mug of burnt coffee steaming beside his keyboard. He lets out a low grumble that sounds like a disk drive trying to spin up after years of neglect.)

Well, isn't this just precious. "Aurora DSQL Auto Analyze." It's got "Aurora" in the name, so you know it's a revolutionary gift from the cloud gods, delivered to us mere mortals on a PowerPoint slide. They're giving us "insights" into a "probabilistic and de-facto stateless method" to automatically compute optimizer statistics.

Probabilistic. That's a fifty-dollar word for "we take a wild guess and hope for the best." Back in my day, we didn't have "probabilistic" methods. We had deterministic methods. You know, methods that actually worked. We called it RUNSTATS on our DB2 mainframe, and we'd kick it off with a JCL script that was more reliable than half the "senior architects" I see walking around here. You'd submit the job, go get a real cup of coffee, and come back to a system catalog with actual facts in it, not a vague premonition based on a tiny sample of the data.

And this "de-facto stateless" business? Oh, that's a gem. You're telling me it has the memory of a goldfish, and you're calling that a feature? We used to call that a bug. We had state. We had system catalogs that were the single source of truth, chiseled into the very platters of a 3380 DASD. The state was so real you could feel the heat coming off the machine room floor. "Stateless" is what happens when you drop your deck of punch cards on the way to the reader—chaos. Now it’s a selling point.

The part that really gets me is the pride they take in this:

Users who are familiar with PostgreSQL will appreciate the similarity to autovacuum analyze.

Congratulations. You've spent millions in R&D to reinvent a feature from a 25-year-old open-source database and bolted it onto your proprietary money-printer. What's next? Are you going to announce a "revolutionary new data durability primitive" called COMMIT? Maybe a "Schema-Driven Data Persistence Paradigm" you call... tables?

We solved this problem while you kids were still trying to figure out how to load a program from a cassette tape. Cost-based optimization? The System R team at IBM laid the groundwork for that in the seventies. We were writing COBOL programs to manually update statistics when a job ran long. We were lugging physical tape reels for our backups—heavy, glorious things—to an off-site storage facility in a snowstorm. That's state, son. When the system chews up your backup tape, you feel the state. You don't get to just reboot an instance and hope the "probabilistic" magic fairy fixes your query plan.

So go on, celebrate your automatic guessing machine. Pat yourselves on the back for writing a glorified cron job with a fancy name. I'll be over here, remembering a time when we built things to last, not just to look good in a press release. It’s all just cycles. The same ideas, over and over, with more jargon and less iron.

(He takes a long, slow slurp of his coffee and shakes his head.)

At least the terminals were a lovely shade of green back then. Much easier on the eyes.