🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Alright, settle down, let me get my reading glasses. My good ones, not the ones with the tape on the bridge. Let's see what the bright young minds over at Elastic have cooked up now.

"Elastic Cloud Serverless pricing and packaging: Evolved for scale and simplicity."

Well, I'll be. Evolved. It's truly a marvel. You have to admire the ambition. It brings a tear to my eye. Back in my day, we didn't have "evolution," we had version numbers and a three-ring binder thick enough to stop a door. And we were grateful for it.

It says here they've created a system that "automatically and dynamically adapts to your workload's needs." Fascinating. It's like they've bottled magic. We used to have something similar. We called him "Gary," the night shift operator. When the batch job started chewing up too many cycles on the mainframe, Gary would get a red light on his console and he'd "dynamically adapt" by calling the on-call programmer at 3 AM to scream at him. Very responsive. Almost zero latency, depending on how close to the phone the programmer was sleeping.

And this whole "serverless" thing. What a concept. It’s a real triumph of marketing, this. Getting rid of the servers! I wish I'd thought of that. All those years I spent in freezing data centers, swapping out tape drives and checking blinking lights... turns out the answer was to just decide the servers don't exist. I suppose if you close your eyes, the CICS region isn't really on fire. I'm sure it's completely different from the time-sharing systems we had on the System/370, where you just paid for the CPU seconds you used. No, this is evolved. It has a better user interface, I'm sure.

"...focus on building applications without the operational overhead of managing infrastructure."

This is my favorite part. It’s heartwarming. They want to free the developers from "operational overhead." That's what we called "knowing how the machine actually works." It was a quaint idea, but we found it helpful when things, you know, broke. I guess now you just file a ticket and hope the person on the other end knows which cloud to yell at. It’s a simpler time.

They're very proud of their new pricing model. Pay for what you use. Groundbreaking. Reminds me of the MIPS pricing on our old IBM z/OS. You used a resource, you got a bill. The only difference is our bill was printed on green bar paper and delivered by a man in a cart, and it could be used as a down payment on a small house. This new way, you just get a notification on your phone that makes you want to throw it into a lake. Progress.

It's all so elastic and simple. You know, this reminds me of a feature we had in DB2 back in '85. The Resource Limit Facility. You could set governors on queries so they didn't run away and consume the whole machine. We didn't call it "serverless auto-scaling consumption-based resource management," of course. We called it "stopping Brenda from marketing from running SELECT * on the master customer table again." But I'm sure this is much more advanced. It probably uses AI.

I remember one time, around '92, a transaction log filled up and corrupted a whole volume. We had to go to the off-site facility—a literal salt mine in Kansas—to get the tape backup. The tape was brittle. The reader was finicky. It took 72 hours of coffee, profanity, and pure, uncut fear to restore that data. I see here they have "automated backups and high availability." That's nice. Takes all the sport out of it, if you ask me. Kids these days will never know the thrill of watching a 3420 reel-to-reel magnetic tape drive successfully read block 1 of a critical database. They'll never know what it is to truly live.

So, yes. This is all very impressive. A great article. They’ve really… evolved. They’ve taken all the core principles of mainframe computing from 40 years ago, wrapped them in a web UI, and called it the future. And you know what? Good for them. It’s a living.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think I have a COBOL program that needs a new PICTURE clause. Some things are just timeless.