Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Well, shut my mouth and call the operator. Another day, another "revolutionary" point release. Version 8.19.4 of the "Elastic Stack." The what now? Sounds like something you'd buy from a late-night infomercial to fix your posture. And they're recommending we upgrade from 8.19.3. Well, thank goodness for that. I was just getting comfortable with the version you shipped twelve hours ago, the one that was probably causing spontaneous data combustion. It's a bold move to recommend your latest bug fix over your previous bug fix. Real courageous.
Back in my day, we didn't have versions 8.19.3 and 8.19.4. We had DB2 Version 2, and it was delivered on a pallet. An upgrade was a year-long project involving three committees, a budget the size of a small country's GDP, and a weekend of downtime where the only thing you could hear was the hum of the mainframe and the sound of me praying over a stack of JCL punch cards. You kids and your apt-get upgrade don't know the fear. You've never had to restore a master database from a 9-track tape that one of the night-shift guys used as a coaster for his Tab soda. I've seen a tape library eat a backup and spit it out like confetti. That's a production issue, not whatever CSS alignment problem you "fixed" in this dot-four release.
And look at this announcement. "For details of the issues that have been fixed... please refer to the release notes." Oh, you don't say? You can't even be bothered to write a single sentence about why I should risk my entire production environment on your latest whim? You want me to go digging through your "release notes," which is probably some wiki page with more moving parts than a Rube Goldberg machine. We used to get three-ring binders thick enough to stop a bullet. You could read them, you could make notes in them, you could hit someone with them if they tried to run an un-indexed query on a multi-million row table.
They talk about this stuff like it's brand new. I've seen the marketing slicks.
"Unstructured data at scale!"
You mean a VSAM file? We had that in '78. We wrote COBOL programs to parse it. It worked. It didn't need a "cluster" of 48 servers that sound like a 747 taking off just to find a customer's last name. We had one machine, the size of a Buick, and it had more uptime than your entire "cloud-native" infrastructure combined.
You kids are so proud of your features.
So yeah, go ahead. Upgrade to 8.19.4. I'm sure it's a monumental leap forward. I'm sure it fixes the catastrophic bugs you introduced in 8.19.3 while quietly planting the seeds for the showstoppers you'll have to fix in 8.19.5 tomorrow afternoon.
It's cute, really. Keep at it. One of these days, you'll reinvent the B-tree index and declare it a breakthrough in "data accessibility paradigms." When you do, give me a call on a landline. I'll be here, making sure the batch jobs run on time.