🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Ah, another dispatch from the front lines of industry. One must simply stand back and applaud the relentless spirit of invention on display here at "Elastic." I've just perused their latest announcement, and the sheer audacity of it all is, in its own way, quite breathtaking.

My, my, "Agentic Query validation"! The courage to coin such a term is a marvel. For a moment, I thought they had achieved some new frontier in artificial consciousness, a sentient query engine contemplating its own logical purity. But no, it appears to be a program... that checks another program's query... before it runs. A linter. A concept so profoundly revolutionary, it’s a wonder the ACM hasn't announced a special Turing Award. One assumes this "agent" has a thorough grounding in relational algebra and query optimization, yes? Or does it simply check for syntax errors and call it a day? The mind reels at the possibilities.

And then we have the pièce de résistance: "Attack Discovery persistence." Truly, a watershed moment in computing. The ability to... save one's work. I had to sit down. After decades of research into durable storage, transaction logs, and write-ahead protocols, it turns out all we needed was a catchy name for it. One can only imagine the hushed, reverent tones in the boardroom when they decided that data, once discovered, should not simply vanish into the ether.

It’s this kind of fearless thinking that makes one question the very foundations we hold so dear. Why bother with the pedantic rigors of ACID properties when you can have... this?

• Atomicity? I suppose an "agentic" action is atomic... eventually? Or perhaps in spirit?
• Consistency? Ah, the 'C' in ACID. A quaint, almost nostalgic suggestion in the face of "eventual consistency." It's a bold strategy to "solve" the CAP theorem by simply pretending the 'C' is a mere serving suggestion. One must admire the gumption.
• Isolation? One shudders to think about the isolation levels of these "automated actions." I'm sure the phantom reads and dirty writes are just features of a more dynamic and agile data environment.
• Durability? Let's just hope their "persistence" is more durable than their grasp of first principles.

It is truly inspiring to see such innovation, untethered by the... shackles... of established theory. Clearly, they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on Ingres, or they'd understand that "automated scheduling and actions" isn't some groundbreaking revelation from 2024; it's a solved problem from the 1970s called a trigger or a stored procedure. But why read papers when you can reinvent the wheel and paint it a fashionable new color? I searched the document in vain for any mention of adherence to even a plurality of Codd's rules, but I suppose when your data model resembles a pile of unstructured laundry, concepts like a guaranteed access rule are simply adorable relics of a bygone era.

They announce automated scheduling and actions "to enable security teams to be more proactive."

Proactive! Indeed. Much in the way a toddler is "proactive" with a set of crayons in a freshly painted room. The results are certainly noticeable, if not entirely coherent.

But I digress. This is not a peer-reviewed paper; it is a blog post. And it reads less like a technical announcement and more like an undergraduate's first attempt at a final project after skipping every lecture on normalization.

I'd give it a C- for enthusiasm, but an F for comprehension. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a relational schema to design—one where "persistence" is an axiom, not a feature announcement.