Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Hoo boy. Let me just take a sip of this coffee that’s been stewing since the Reagan administration and read that again. "At Percona, open source is not just something we use. It is who we are."
Bless your hearts.
You know who I am? I’m the guy who got paged at 3:17 AM on a Sunday because a janitor tripped over the power cord to a disk array controller during a batch run. My "identity" was built on magnetic tape, JCL, and the cold, primal fear of a corrupted master file. We didn't have a "mission statement," we had a service-level agreement written on a piece of paper that the department head would wave in your face while screaming about the quarterly reports.
This whole thing... "make open source databases better for everyone." That’s nice. Back in my day, our mission was simpler: "Don't lose the data." That was it. You accomplished that, you got to keep your job. You failed, you were updating your resume on a typewriter. There was no "community engagement," there was just Frank from accounting, smelling of stale cigars, breathing down your neck asking why the COBOL program for payroll just abended with a file status code 39. You didn't "engage" with Frank. You fixed the VSAM file and prayed he went away.
Every time I see one of these manifestos, it’s always about some revolutionary new feature. Let me tell you something, kid. There are no new ideas, just new marketing departments with bigger budgets. You kids are all excited about your "schemaless" JSON data stores? Congratulations, you reinvented the variable-length record in a COBOL copybook, only you made it uglier and harder to debug. We were dealing with unstructured garbage data back when your parents were listening to Duran Duran on a Walkman.
That mission guides our product decisions, our business model...
Your business model? I remember the business model. IBM sold you a mainframe that cost more than a small island nation. They sold you the software. Then they sold you the support contracts. Then they sold you the training. Then they sold you the manuals, each one thick enough to stop a bullet. Seems to me this "open source" model is just the same thing with a smiley face sticker and a GitHub repository. You give the database away for free, then you sell the panic. It's the same business model, just with more hoodies.
You want to talk war stories? Forget your little Kubernetes cluster failing over. Let me tell you about a real disaster recovery plan.
We didn’t have "point-in-time recovery" with a fancy slider GUI. We had a log of tapes and a lot of hope. And it worked. Mostly.
So when I read about your grand mission, I have to chuckle. You haven't invented anything. You've just put a new coat of paint on the same old problems. Distributed transactions? We had that in IMS. Row-level locking? DB2, circa 1985. You’re all just re-running the plays from a dusty old playbook you found in the basement, convinced you’re the first ones to think of it.
Anyway, you go on and share whatever it is you were going to share. I’ve got a pot of coffee to burn and a sneaking suspicion that somewhere, a batch job written in 1982 is about to fail because of a two-digit year field.
And no, I will not be reading the rest of this. The green screen is calling my name.