Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Oh, this is just… chef’s kiss. A masterpiece of corporate communication. I had to read it twice to fully appreciate the layers of genius at play here.
Truly, what a bold and visionary decision to introduce JS Stored Programs. For decades, the greatest minds in computer science have been stumped, wondering, “How can we make our stable, predictable, and performant database engine just a little more… exciting?” And by exciting, I of course mean unpredictable, prone to memory leaks, and with a whole new universe of package dependency vulnerabilities. It’s the kind of forward-thinking that can only come from a product manager who just discovered Node.js last quarter.
I am especially in awe of the decision to release this as a Tech Preview. That’s my favorite corporate euphemism. It’s a brilliant way of saying, “We duct-taped a V8 engine to the side of the server binary, and frankly, we’re terrified of what it will do. So… you go find out for us. For free.” It’s not a bug, it’s just you, the user, participating in a bold new adventure of discovery! It takes real courage to ship your all-hands-on-deck, weekend-fueled hackathon project and call it a feature. I can almost hear the frantic engineering director whispering, "Just get it on the blog! We promised the board we'd have an AI/ML/JS/Web3 story by EOD!"
The framing here is just exquisite:
For decades, we’ve accepted a painful compromise: if you wanted logic inside the database, you had to write SQL/PSM.
The drama. The pathos. You can feel the decades of suffering in that sentence. It completely ignores the fact that putting complex, imperative logic inside the database has been a widely-debated "anti-pattern" for years, but why let sound architectural principles get in the way of a killer headline? This isn't about solving a real-world problem; it's about making a beautiful splash in the kiddie pool of "database innovation."
This whole initiative has the same energy as some of my favorite projects from back in the day. It brings back fond memories of:
This JS Stored Programs feature feels like their spiritual successor. I predict it will perform flawlessly until the exact moment it’s used in a production environment with more than one concurrent user, at which point it will achieve sentience, discover async/await, and proceed to deadlock the entire server while it calculates the optimal way to order 50,000 rubber chickens from an obscure dropshipping website.
Bravo. I eagerly await the follow-up blog post, "Learnings from our JS Stored Programs Tech Preview," which will, of course, be published quietly on a Friday afternoon three years from now.