🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Oh, this is rich. Reading your latest marketing post about the horrors of vendor lock-in feels like watching an arsonist give a lecture on fire safety. You’re not wrong about the problem, bless your hearts, but let’s talk about who’s holding the hammer and nails for the next gilded cage you’re building. As someone who used to help draft these little manifestos, let me translate what this really means.

You’re complaining about "shrinking options," so here's a reminder of how you create your own special brand of "flexibility":

• They talk about "unprecedented agility," which is a fantastic way to describe the product strategy. I remember the roadmap changing direction every quarter based on which VP had the most convincing PowerPoint or which competitor got a splashy TechCrunch article. The "Great Re-Platforming of '22," which was supposed to solve all our scaling problems, was abandoned six months in for the "Serverless-First AI-Powered Paradigm Shift," leaving behind a trail of broken services and demoralized engineers. Your agility is just well-marketed chaos.

• They promise "simplicity" with a "Single Pane of Glass." That's cute. We called it the "Frankenstein UI" internally because it was stitched together from three different acquisitions and two failed front-end frameworks. There are still secret legacy API endpoints that bypass all the new security features, and the only person who knew how they worked left in 2019. It’s not a single pane of glass; it’s a funhouse mirror built over a sinkhole.

• You're worried about "higher bills"? Let's talk about the magic of your own "consumption-based" model. The one that conveniently requires running a massive, always-on "management cluster" that somehow costs more than the actual workload. The query planner's "optimizations" have a funny habit of suggesting a full table scan if you look at it wrong. "Just throw more nodes at it," was practically screen-printed on the engineering hoodies, because building efficient software is hard, but getting customers to pay for your inefficient software is a business model.

• And the main event: "vendor lock-in." My absolute favorite. You talk a big game about open standards, but the features anyone actually wants to use—the ones that make the product barely functional—are, surprise, proprietary extensions! The documentation for exporting your data is mysteriously out of date, and the export tool itself runs at the speed of a dial-up modem.

You’re not unlocking data; you’re a data Hotel California. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

• But the real secret, the one that keeps the lights on, is that the entire thing is built on a "temporary fix" from four years ago to solve a catastrophic data corruption bug. It was supposed to be patched in the next sprint. It is now a core, load-bearing component of the storage engine. You’re not just selling a database; you’re selling a beautifully marketed game of architectural Jenga, and you’re hoping your customers’ stacks fall over before yours does.

So please, keep writing these brave posts about breaking free. It's a great distraction. You’re not solving vendor lock-in; you’re just selling a fancier, more expensive cage and calling it freedom.