🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Well, look at this. One of the fresh-faced junior admins, bless his heart, slid this article onto my desk—printed out, of course, because he knows I don't trust those flickering web browsers. Said it was "critical reading." I'll give it this: it's a real page-turner, if you're a fan of watching people solve problems we ironed out before the Berlin Wall came down.

It's just delightful to see you youngsters discovering the concept of a finite number space. OID exhaustion. Sounds so dramatic, doesn't it? Like you've run out of internet. Oh no, the 32-bit integer counter wrapped around! The humanity! Back in my day, we didn't have the luxury of billions of anything. We had to plan our file systems with a pencil, paper, and a healthy fear of the system operator. You kids treat storage like an all-you-can-eat buffet and then write think-pieces when you finally get a tummy ache. We had to manually allocate cylinders on a DASD pack. You wouldn't last five minutes.

And this... this TOAST table business. I had to read that twice. You're telling me your fancy, modern database takes oversized data and... makes toast out of it? What's next, a "BAGEL" protocol for indexing? A "CROISSANT" framework for replication? We called this "data overflow handling" and it was managed with pointer records in an IMS database. It wasn't cute, it wasn't named after breakfast, and it worked. You've just invented a more complicated version of a linked list and given it a name that makes me hungry.

The troubleshooting advice is a real hoot, too. You have to "review wait events" and "monitor session activity" to figure out the system is grinding to a halt. It’s like watching a toddler discover his own toes and calling it a breakthrough in anatomical science.

...we discuss practical solutions, from cleaning up data to more advanced strategies such as partitioning.

"Advanced strategies such as partitioning." I think I just sprained something laughing. Advanced? Son, we were partitioning datasets on DB2 back in 1985 on systems with less processing power than your smart watch. We did it with 80-column punch cards and JCL that would make a grown man weep. It wasn't an "advanced strategy," it was Tuesday. You have a keyword that does it for you. We had to offer a blood sacrifice to the mainframe and hope we didn't get a S0C7 abend.

The real solution was always proper data hygiene, but nobody wants to hear that. It’s more fun to build a digital Rube Goldberg machine of microservices and then write a blog post about the one loose screw you found. I remember spending a whole weekend one time just spooling data off to tape reels—reels the size of dinner plates—just to defragment a database. We'd load them up in a tape library that sounded like a locomotive crashing, and we were grateful for it. You all talk about data cleanup like it’s a chore. For us, it was the whole job.

So, thanks for this enlightening read. It’s been a fascinating glimpse into how all the problems we solved thirty years ago in COBOL are now being rediscovered with more buzzwords and, apparently, worse planning. It's like putting racing stripes on a lawnmower and calling it a sports car.

Truly, a fantastic piece of work. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some VSAM files to check. Rest assured, I will never, ever be reading your blog again. It’s been a pleasure.