🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Alright, settle down, kids. Let me put down my coffee—the real kind, brewed in a pot that's been stained brown since the Reagan administration—and take a look at this... this press release from the future.

"Elastic named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cognitive Search Platforms, Q4 2025."

Well, isn't that just precious? A "Leader." I've been a leader in my fantasy football league three times and all it got me was a cheap plastic trophy and the obligation to buy the first round. And they've won an award for the end of 2025? My goodness. Back in my day, you had to actually, you know, finish the quarter before you got a gold star for it. We called that "auditing." These days, I guess you just call it synergy.

"Cognitive Search." Oh, you have to forgive an old man. We had a simpler term for that back on the System/370: a program that works. The idea that the machine is "thinking"... Listen, I've seen a CICS transaction get stuck in a loop that printed gibberish to the console for six hours straight. The only thing that machine was "thinking" about was the heat death of the universe.

They talk about semantic understanding and vector search like they've split the atom all over again. It's adorable. You're telling me you can turn a sentence into a string of numbers to find... other, similar strings of numbers? Groundbreaking. We were doing that with DB2 in '85. It wasn't called "AI-powered vector similarity," it was called a "well-designed indexing strategy" written by a guy in a short-sleeved button-down who actually understood the data. You didn't ask the machine to understand the "vibe" of your query. You wrote a proper SQL statement, maybe threw in a LIKE clause with a few wildcards, and you got your answer. If you were slow, the system administrator walked over to your desk and asked if you were trying to boil the processor.

...a platform that intelligently surfaces the most relevant information...

You want to see "relevant information surfaced intelligently"? Try dropping a tray of 80-column punch cards for the quarterly payroll run. You'll see a team of five COBOL programmers "intelligently surface" every single one of those cards into the correct order with a level of focus and terror you startup folks have never experienced. That's a high-availability, fault-tolerant, human-powered sorting algorithm.

I'm sure this "Forrester Wave™"—and you just know they paid a handsome fee for that little ™ symbol—is filled with all sorts of metrics.

• Query latency measured in milliseconds. We measured things in "number of coffee breaks you could take while the batch job ran."
• Unprecedented scale. We called that adding another tape library. It was the size of a small car and sounded like a jet taking off, but it worked. You learn a lot about data integrity when you know a single speck of dust on a magnetic tape can wipe out a month's worth of financial records. You kids and your "ephemeral cloud storage" have no idea of the physical dread.
• Intuitive user interface. Is it more intuitive than a 3270 green screen? Because on that screen, you knew exactly where you were. You were in hell. But it was a consistent, predictable hell.

So congratulations, Elastic. You've successfully reinvented a well-indexed VSAM file, slapped a marketing budget on it that could fund a small country, and got some analyst who's never had to degauss a tape to call you a "Leader." It's the same cycle, over and over. Hierarchical, network, relational, object-oriented, NoSQL, and now this... "Cognitive." It's all just new hats on the same old data retrieval problems.

The more things change, the more I have to explain why the old way worked just fine. Now if you'll excuse me, I think I hear a mainframe calling my name. Probably forgot its own boot sequence again. They get forgetful in their old age. Just like the rest of us.