Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, settle down, kids. Rick "The Relic" Thompson here. I just spilled my Sanka all over my terminal laughing at this latest dispatch from the "cloud." You youngsters and your blogs about "discoveries" are a real hoot. You write about upgrading a database like you just split the atom, when really you just paid a cloud vendor to push a button for you. Let me pour another lukewarm coffee and break this down for you.
First off, this whole "Amazon Aurora Blue/Green Deployment" song and dance. You discovered... a standby database? Congratulations. In 1988, we called this "the disaster recovery site." It wasn't blue or green; it was beige, weighed two tons, and lived in a bunker three states away. We didn't have a fancy user interface to "promote" the standby. We had a binder full of REXX scripts, a conference call with three angry VPs, and a physical key we had to turn. You've just reinvented the hot-swap with a pretty color palette. DB2 HADR has been doing this since you were in diapers.
And you're awfully proud of your "near-zero downtime." Let me tell you about downtime, sonny. "Near-zero" is the marketing department's way of saying it still went down. We had maintenance windows that were announced weeks in advance on green bar paper. If the batch jobs didn't finish, you stayed there all weekend. You lived on vending machine chili and adrenaline. We didn't brag about "near-zero" downtime; we were just thankful to have the system back up by Monday morning so the tellers could process transactions. Your carefully orchestrated, one-click failover is adorable. Did you get a participation trophy for it?
Oh, the scale! "Tens of billions of daily cloud resource metadata entries." That's cute. It really is. You're processing log files. Back in my day, we processed the entire financial ledger for a national bank every single night, on a machine with 64 megabytes of memory. That's megabytes. We didn't have "metadata," we had EBCDIC-encoded files on 3480 tape cartridges that we had to load by hand. You're bragging about reading a big text file; we were moving the actual money, one COBOL transaction at a time.
And this database is apparently serving "hundreds of microservices." You know what we called a system that did hundreds of different things? A single, well-written monolithic application running on CICS. You didn't need "hundreds" of anything. You needed one program, a team that knew how it worked, and a line printer that could handle 2,000 lines per minute. You kids built a digital Rube Goldberg machine and now you're writing articles about how you managed to change a lightbulb in one of its hundred little rooms without the whole contraption collapsing. Bravo.
In this post, we share how we upgraded our Aurora PostgreSQL database from version 14 to 16...
Anyway, thanks for the trip down memory lane. It's good to know that after forty years, the industry is still congratulating itself for solving problems that were already solved when Miami Vice was on the air.
I’ll be sure to file this blog post in the same place I filed my punch cards. The recycling bin.