🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Alright, settle down, whippersnappers. 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 "guide."

"New to Valkey?" Oh, you mean the "new" thing that's a fork of the other thing that promised to change the world a few years ago? Adorable. You kids and your forks. Back in my day, we didn't "fork" projects. We got one set of manuals, three hundred pages thick, printed on genuine recycled punch cards, and if you didn't like it, you wrote your own damn access methods in Assembler. And you liked it!

Let’s cut to the chase: Switching tools or trying something new should never slow you […]

Heh. Hehehe. Oh, that's a good one. Let me tell you about "not slowing down." The year is 1988. We're migrating the entire accounts receivable system from a flat-file system to DB2. A process that was supposed to take a weekend. Three weeks later, I'm sleeping on a cot in the server room, surviving on coffee that could dissolve steel and the sheer terror of corrupting six million customer records. Our "guide" was a binder full of COBOL copybooks and a Senior VP breathing down our necks asking if the JCL was "done compiling" yet. You think clicking a button in some web UI is "overwhelming"? Try physically mounting a 2400-foot tape reel for the third time because a single misaligned bit in the parity check sent your whole restore process back to the Stone Age.

This whole thing reads like a pamphlet for a timeshare. "Answers, not some fancy sales pitch." Son, this whole blog is a sales pitch. You're selling me the same thing we had thirty years ago, just with more JSON and a fancier logo. An in-memory, key-value data structure? Congratulations, you've reinvented the CICS scratchpad facility. We were doing fast-access, non-persistent data storage on IBM mainframes while your parents were still trying to figure out their Atari. The only difference is our system had an uptime measured in years, not "nines," and it didn't fall over if someone looked at the network cable the wrong way.

You're talking about all these "basics" to get me "up and running." What are we running?

• Atomic operations? We called that a transaction commit with a two-phase lock. We had it in IMS databases in the 70s.
• Pub/Sub? That's a clever name for a message queue. Ever hear of MQSeries? It's been doing that reliably since before the internet had pictures.
• High availability? We had hot-standby mainframes in a bunker three states away, connected by a dedicated line that cost more than your entire company's seed funding.

You're not creating anything new. You're just taking old, proven concepts, stripping out the reliability and the documentation, and sticking a REST API on the front. You talk about "cutting to the chase" like you're saving me time. You know what saved me time? Not having to debate which of the twelve JavaScript frameworks we were going to use to display the data we just failed to retrieve from your "revolutionary" new database.

So thank you for the guide. It's been... illuminating. It's reminded me that the more things change, the more they stay the same, just with worse names.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a batch job to monitor. It's only been running since 1992, but I like to check on it. I'll be sure to file this blog post away in the same place I keep my Y2K survival guide. Don't worry, I won't be back for part two.