🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Oh, what a fantastic read. I just love the boundless optimism. It's so refreshing to see someone ask, "Why change something that just works?" with the unstated, yet screamingly obvious answer: for the thrill of a 72-hour production outage!

Truly, it's inspiring. The argument that Redis's greatest strength—that it just works—is also its "potential challenge" is the kind of galaxy-brain take I've come to expect from thought leaders who haven't had to restore a corrupted key space from a six-hour-old backup at 3:00 AM on a Sunday. My eye is twitching just thinking about it.

I'm especially excited about the prospect of another "simple" migration. My therapist and I have been making real progress working through the memories of the last few:

• The Great Mongo-to-Postgres Debacle of '19, where we discovered a whole new category of "eventual consistency" which was, in practice, "occasional data presence."
• The ScyllaDB Incident of '21, where we learned that "performant at scale" meant "melts down completely if a node looks at it funny."
• And, of course, the brief but memorable fling with that serverless, geo-replicated, AI-powered vaporware database that turned out to be a Google Sheet with an API wrapper.

It's always the same beautiful story. It starts with a whitepaper full of promises, moves to a Slack channel full of excitement, and ends in a war room full of cold pizza and broken dreams. I cherish the moment in every migration when a project manager confidently states:

"The migration script is 98% done, it just needs some light testing."

That phrase is my Vietnam. It's the sound of my weekend evaporating. It’s the harbinger of cryptic error messages that don't exist on Stack Overflow.

So yes, let's absolutely replace the one component in our stack that doesn't regularly wake me up with a heart attack. Let's introduce a new, exciting system with its own special, innovative failure modes. I'm tired of the same old Redis outages. I want new ones. I want to debug distributed consensus issues, not simple connection pool exhaustion. I want my problems to be as next-gen as our tech stack.

So thank you for this article. You've given me so much to look forward to. I'm already mentally preparing the post-mortem document and drafting the apology email to our customers.

Anyway, my PagerDuty app is freshly updated. Can't wait for the "go-live." It's going to be transformative.