Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Ah, another "year in review" from the ivory tower, a curated list of the intellectual fireworks that will become my next on-call nightmare. I’m scrolling through this between a PagerDuty alert for a memory leak and a Slack thread about why the dev environment is, once again, on fire. It's always a treat to see the blueprints for my future suffering laid out so neatly. Here’s my "in the trenches" review of your review.
I see a deep dive on Concurrency Control and Serializable Isolation. This is fantastic. I have vivid, waking flashbacks to the Great Deadlock of ‘23, when we implemented a "theoretically perfect" isolation level from a whitepaper just like these. It turns out that theory doesn't account for a million users trying to buy the same limited-edition sneaker at the same time. The database became a very, very expensive single-threaded process. We achieved perfect consistency by achieving zero throughput. A bold architectural choice, to be sure.
"Disaggregation: A New Architecture for Cloud Databases." Oh, good. My favorite. Let’s take the one big, complicated thing I have to monitor and shatter it into twelve smaller, equally complicated things that all have to talk to each other over a network that has the reliability of a politician's promise. Instead of one database falling over, I now get to play Clue at 3 AM to figure out if it was the compute node in the closet with the faulty network cable, or the storage daemon with the memory leak.
You're excited about Formal methods and using TLA+ to prove a system is correct. That’s adorable. You know what my formal verification method is? A 200-line bash script, a pot of coffee black enough to dissolve steel, and the cold sweat that forms when I type apply on a Terraform plan that touches the main user table. Your models prove a system works in a perfect world. My alerts prove it doesn't work in this one.
TLA+ is great for modeling away problems like "Dave from Sales tripped over the power cord" or "An AWS region has spontaneously decided to experience 'weather'."
Oh, and of course, AI. "Supporting our AI overlords: Redesigning data systems to be Agent-first." Let me translate that for you: "Let's bolt an unpredictable, non-deterministic black box that hallucinates its own query language onto our most critical infrastructure." I cannot wait for the ticket that reads: "The billing-agent decided our revenue data would be more 'aesthetically pleasing' if it was all prime numbers and has proactively optimized the production database. Please revert."
This whole list of papers on 'Morty: Scaling Concurrency Control' and 'Vive la Difference: Practical Diff Testing' isn't just a reading list. It’s a preview of the slide deck our CTO, who definitely read your blog, is going to present at the next all-hands. It’s the ammunition for a six-month "simple" migration to a "paradigm-shifting" database that will solve all our problems by creating entirely new, more interesting ones.
Enjoy basking in the warm glow of your sixty posts. I’ll be over here, clutching my emergency rollback script and waiting for one of these "sharp and sensible" ideas to hit my pager.