🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Alright, let me just put down my abacus and my third lukewarm coffee of the morning. Another CEO announcement. Wonderful.

"Peter Farkas will serve as Percona’s new Chief Executive Officer, where he will build on the company’s long-standing track record of success with an eye toward continuous innovation and growth."

Let me translate that from corporate nonsense into balance-sheet English for you. "Innovation" means finding new and exciting ways to charge us for things that used to be included. And "growth"? Oh, that's simple. That’s the projected increase in their revenue, lifted directly from our operating budget. It’s a "track record of success," alright—a successful track record of convincing VPs of Engineering that spending seven figures on a database is somehow cheaper than hiring one competent DBA.

This isn’t about Mr. Farkas—I’m sure he’s a lovely guy who enjoys sailing on a yacht paid for by my company's data egress fees. This is about the whole shell game. They come in here, waving around whitepapers filled with jargon like “hyper-elastic scalability” and “multi-cloud data fabric,” and they promise you the world. They show you a demo on a pristine, empty database that runs faster than a junior analyst sprinting away from a 401k seminar.

But they never show you the real price tag. The one I have to calculate on the back of a rejected expense report.

Let’s do some Penny Pincher math, shall we? Your sales rep, who looks like he’s 22 and has never seen a command line in his life, quotes you a "simple" license fee. Let’s call it a cool $250,000 a year. A bargain! he says.

But here’s the Goldman Gauntlet of Fiscal Reality:

• The “Seamless” Migration: This is my favorite lie. They say it's easy. I hear, "a team of six of our most expensive engineers will be tied up for two full quarters, learning a proprietary query language and discovering that half our critical stored procedures are now 'legacy features'." That's not a migration; it's a hostage situation. Let’s conservatively pencil in $750,000 in salary and lost productivity.
• Mandatory Training: Our team is brilliant, but they don't magically know your "revolutionary" new architecture. So we have to fly in your "certified expert" for a week. He charges $10,000 a day to read a PowerPoint presentation that was clearly written by the marketing department. Add another $50,000.
• The Inevitable Consultants: Six months after the "seamless" migration, everything is on fire. Performance is terrible. The vendor, shocked—shocked!—says we’ve implemented it wrong. But not to worry! They have a "professional services" team of consultants, billing at $600 an hour, who can come in and fix the mess their own product created. Budget another $200,000 for them to tell us to "re-index the primary cluster."

So, that "simple" $250,000 platform is now a $1.25 million first-year line item. And that’s before we even talk about the pricing model itself, a masterpiece of financial sadism. Is it per-CPU? Per-query? Per-gigabyte-stored? Per-thought-crime-committed-against-the-database? You don't know until the bill arrives, and by then, your data is so deeply embedded in their proprietary ecosystem that getting it out would be more expensive than just paying the ransom. That, my friends, is called vendor lock-in, or as I like to call it, a data roach motel.

They’ll show you a chart with a hockey-stick curve labeled "ROI." They claim this new system will save us millions by "reducing server footprint" and "improving developer velocity." My math shows that for the $1.25 million we've spent, we've saved maybe $80,000 in AWS costs. That's not ROI, that's an acronym for Ridiculous Outgoing Investment.

So congratulations on the new CEO, Percona. I hope he’s got a good plan for that continuous growth. He’ll need it.

Because from where I'm sitting, your "innovation" looks a lot like a shakedown, and my budget is officially closed for that kind of business.