🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Alright, team, gather 'round. I’ve just finished reading this… inspirational piece of literature from our friends at CockroachDB and CedarDB, titled "Better Together." And I must say, it’s a compelling argument. A compelling argument for me to start stress-testing the company's liquidation procedures.

They paint this heart-wrenching picture of a poor, overworked database struggling with an "innocent looking query." Oh, the humanity! A query that has the sheer audacity to ask for our top 10 products, their sales figures, and inventory levels. This isn't an "innocent query," this is a Tuesday morning report. If our current system chokes on a top-10 list, we don't need a new database, we need to fire the person who bought the last one. Probably the same V.P. of 'Synergistic Innovation' who approved this blog post.

But let's play their game. Let's pretend we're in this apocalyptic scenario where we can't figure out what our best-selling widget is. The solution, apparently, is not one, but two new database systems, because "Better Together" is just marketing speak for "Neither of our products could do the whole job alone."

They conveniently forget to include the price tag in this little fairy tale, so let me get out my trusty napkin and a red pen. I call this exercise "Calculating the True Cost of an Engineer's Fever Dream."

Let's assume the sticker price for this dynamic duo is a "modest" $500,000 a year in licensing. A bargain, I'm sure. But that's just the cover charge to get into the nightclub of financial ruin.

• The Great Data Migration Pilgrimage: We have to move terabytes of data. This will not be done by cheerful elves in the dead of night. No, this will be done by consultants. Consultants who bill at $400 an hour and communicate exclusively in acronyms. Let's budget a cool $1 million for them to inevitably copy-paste a schema incorrectly, bringing sales to a screeching halt for three days during the Q4 rush.
• The "Re-Education" Camp: Our entire engineering team, who are already overworked, now have to become experts in two esoteric new systems. That's a month of lost productivity for a dozen engineers, plus the cost of the training itself. Let's call that $250,000 in opportunity cost and fees. Suddenly, they're not shipping features; they're learning the "nuances" of a "distributed SQL paradigm." Fabulous.
• The "Better Together" Integration Tax: These two systems don't just magically hold hands and sing Kumbaya. Oh no. You need a dedicated team to write, maintain, and inevitably debug the custom glue code that holds this monstrosity together. That’s two new senior engineers we have to hire, assuming we can even find people with "CockroachDB and CedarDB" on their LinkedIn profiles. That’s another $400,000 a year, easy.

So, let's tally that up. Our initial, "innocent" $500k investment is actually a $2.15 million hole in my Year 1 budget. And for what? So a product manager can get his top-10 list 0.8 seconds faster? My back-of-the-napkin ROI calculation on that is... let's see... carry the one... ah, yes: negative infinity.

They talk about how this query is "challenging for industry-leading transactional database systems."

Take the innocent task of finding the the 10 top-grossing items, along with how much we sold, how much money they made, what we usually charge per unit...

This isn't a challenge; it's a sales pitch built on a manufactured crisis. They are selling us a billion-dollar hammer for a thumbtack, and telling us our existing hammer is fundamentally broken. They're not selling a solution; they're selling vendor lock-in, squared. Once we're on two proprietary systems, our negotiating power for renewal drops to approximately zero. They'll have us.

So here is my prediction if we approve this. Q1, we sign the deal. Q2, the consultants arrive and commandeer the good conference room. Q3, the migration fails twice, corrupting our staging environment. Q4, we finally "go live," just as they announce a 30% price hike for Year 2. The year after that, we're explaining to shareholders why our "Strategic Data Initiative" has the same annual budget as a small European nation and our primary business is now generating bug reports for two different companies.

So, no. We will not be making our databases "Better Together." We will be keeping our cash "Better in Our Bank Account." Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go deny a request for new office chairs. Those things are expensive.