🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Alright, which one of you left this... this masterpiece of marketing fluff on the coffee machine? "Expose hidden threats with EASE." EASE. Let me guess, it stands for Enormously Ambiguous Security Expense, right? Heh. You kids and your acronyms.

"Unprecedented visibility into your data lake." Unprecedented? Son, in 1987, I had more visibility into our IMS hierarchical database with a ream of green bar paper and a bottle of NoDoz than you'll ever get with this web-based cartoon. We didn't need a "single pane of glass"; we had a thirty-pound printout of the transaction log. If something looked funny, you found it with a ruler and a red pen, not by asking some AI-powered magic eight ball.

And that's my favorite part. "AI-powered anomaly detection." You mean a glorified IF-THEN-ELSE loop with a bigger marketing budget? We had that in COBOL. We called it "writing a decent validation routine." If a transaction from the Peoria branch suddenly tried to debit the main treasury account for a billion dollars, we didn't need a machine learning model to tell us something was fishy. We had a guy named Stan, and Stan would call Peoria and yell. That was our real-time threat detection.

You're all so proud of your "Zero Trust" architecture. You think you invented paranoia? Back in my day, we didn't trust anything. We didn't trust the network, we didn't trust the terminals, we didn't trust the night-shift operator who always smelled faintly of schnapps. We called it "security." Your "zero trust" is just putting a fancy name on what was standard operating procedure when computers were the size of a Buick and twice as loud.

...our revolutionary SaaS-native, cloud-first platform empowers your DevOps teams to be proactive, not reactive.

Revolutionary? Cloud-first? You mean you're renting time on someone else's mainframe, and you're proud of it? We had that! It was called a "time-sharing service." We'd dial in with a 300-baud modem that screeched like a dying cat. The only difference is we didn't call it "the cloud," we called it "the computer in Poughkeepsie." And "empowering DevOps?" We didn't have DevOps. We had Dave, and if you needed a new dataset allocated, you filled out form 7-B in triplicate and hoped Dave was in a good mood. That's your "seamless integration" right there.

Don't even get me started on your metrics.

• "Saved one client $1.2 million in potential breach costs." How do you measure something that didn't happen? That's like me saying I saved the company a trillion dollars by not spilling coffee on the master tape library this morning.
• "99.999% uptime." Adorable. I once had a production DB2 instance stay up for three straight years. Its uptime was only interrupted because the building it was in was scheduled for demolition. We argued we could keep it running during the teardown, too.
• "Real-time data lineage." You mean an audit trail? We had that. It was just spread across fifty reels of magnetic tape that you had to mount by hand. It built character. You'd lug those tapes, each the size of a pizza, through a data center kept at a brisk 60 degrees. That was your "data pipeline."

You know, every single "revolutionary" feature in this pamphlet... we tried it. We built it. It was probably a module in DB2 version 1.2, written in System/370 assembler. It worked, but we didn't give it a cute name and a billion dollars in venture capital funding. We just called it "doing our jobs."

So go on, install your "EASE." Let me know how it goes. I predict in five years, you'll all be raving about a new paradigm: "Scheduled Asynchronous Block-Oriented Ledger" technology.

You'll call it SABOL. We called it a batch job. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a VSAM file that needs reorganizing, and it's not going to defragment itself.