Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Ah, another dispatch from the front lines of industry. One must admire the sheer velocity of it all. Version 9.2.3... it simply rolls off the tongue. Such rapid iteration is a testament to the modern agile spirit, isn't it? One could almost mistake it for a frantic attempt to patch a fundamentally unsound architecture, but I am assured it is what the children call "innovation."
It's a marvel, this "Elastic Stack." A 'stack,' you say? How... versatile. Not for them, the rigid, mathematically-proven elegance of the relational model. Why bother with the tiresome constraints of normalization when you can simply throw documents into a heap and hope for the best? One must assume their interpretation of Codd's twelve rules is, shall we say, impressionistic. I suppose Rule 0, the Foundation Rule, was more of a gentle suggestion.
The authors exhibit a laudable brevity. They simply state:
For details of the issues that have been fixed and a full list of changes for each product in this version, please refer to the release notes.
This is, in its own way, a stroke of genius. It presupposes an audience that has neither the time nor the inclination for pesky details like justification or theoretical underpinnings. They've understood their market perfectly. Why write a whitepaper when a link will suffice? Nobody reads the papers anymore, anyway. Clearly they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on ingress and query decomposition, or they'd understand that these "issues" they've fixed are not bugs, but predictable consequences of their design choices.
One can only read between the lines and applaud their bravery. I see they've been fixing "issues," which is a charmingly understated way of admitting to a series of cascading failures. I'm sure their approach to the fundamental ACID properties is equally forward-thinking.
They speak of "eventual consistency" as if it's an exciting feature they invented, rather than a concession to the immutable laws of distributed systems—a trilemma so elegantly articulated in Brewer's CAP theorem that it pains me to see it treated as a marketing bullet point. They've chosen Availability and Partition Tolerance, and now heroically patch the resulting consistency anomalies release after release. It's like watching a toddler repeatedly discover gravity by falling down the stairs, and celebrating each tumble as a new "mobility paradigm."
It is, all in all, a fascinating cultural artifact. A monument to the cheerful ignorance of first principles.
A truly fascinating document. It will make a wonderful footnote in a future paper on the Dunning-Kruger effect in modern software engineering.