🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Alright, settle down, kids. Let me put down my coffee—the real kind, brewed in a pot that's been stained brown since the Clinton administration, not some single-use pod nonsense—and read this... this cri de cœur.

A nightmare. Your nightmare is your manager calling you "Mr. Clever" in a dream.

Oh, you sweet summer child. Let me tell you about a real nightmare. A nightmare is the air conditioning failing in the data center in July. It’s the lead operator tripping over the power cord to the DASD array during the nightly batch run. A nightmare is realizing the tape backup from last night—the one you physically carried to the off-site vault in a rainstorm—is corrupted, and the one from the night before was overwritten by an intern running the wrong JCL deck. Your little psychodrama is what we used to call a "Tuesday."

But okay, let's play along. I'm sure this riveting tale of dream-based performance reviews pivots to some groundbreaking new technology that solves all your problems. Let me guess. It's a fully-managed, multi-cloud, serverless, document-oriented database with AI-powered observability. Am I close?

I can just picture the bullet points in the rest of this post you mercifully spared me from:

• "Effortless Scaling!" You mean you pay a cloud provider a king's ransom to throw more hardware at a problem you were too lazy to index properly. Back in my day, we did capacity planning. We had to justify every single CPU cycle and every kilobyte of memory to a guy named Frank who smoked three packs a day and treated the mainframe's resources like it was his firstborn child. You kids just put your credit card on file and call it "elasticity."

• "Flexible Schema!" Oh, my favorite. You call it a "flexible schema," I call it a cry for help. It's anarchy. It's giving up. We had this thing called a COBOL copybook. It was a contract. You knew, down to the byte, what CUST-LAST-NAME PIC X(20) meant. It was rigid because the business was rigid. Your "flexibility" is just kicking the data integrity can down the road until some poor soul in analytics has to parse a million variations of a field called customer_name, custName, and c_nm.

• "Revolutionary JSON Support!"

  You're telling me you can store nested key-value pairs? Wow. Stop the presses. We had hierarchical databases in the seventies. It was called IMS. It was a pain in the ass, sure, but don't you dare stand there and tell me that storing a document is some kind of paradigm shift you invented last Tuesday. We were doing this stuff on green screens when your CEO was still learning how to use a fork. This isn't innovation; it's just cyclical amnesia with a better marketing department.

I can just see the success metrics. "We reduced query latency by 90% and improved developer velocity by 300%!" Compared to what? A system written by chimps on typewriters? A SELECT statement running against a flat file on a floppy disk? We had DB2 in 1985, son. It could join tables. It enforced constraints. It had a query optimizer that was smarter than half the new hires you've got. You think your newfangled database is hot stuff because it can handle a few thousand concurrent users? We were processing the entire payroll for a Fortune 100 company in a four-hour batch window on a machine with less processing power than your doorbell.

So please, spare me the nightmares about your manager. The real nightmare is watching an entire generation of engineers reinventing the wheel, slapping a new coat of paint and a dozen acronyms on it, and calling it a spaceship. You haven't solved the hard problems; you've just outsourced them and wrapped them in a REST API.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go check on a real database. One that doesn't have a "feelings" API. The coffee's getting cold.