🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Ah, yes, another dispatch from the front lines. One must concede, it is truly a brave new world out there. I've just perused this... article... on the profound strategic importance of a "Kubernetes operator." And I must say, the author's perspective is nothing short of breathtaking. It's a triumph of plumbing over architecture, a real masterclass in focusing on the faucet while the foundations of the house crumble into the sea.

To suggest that one's database strategy is defined by the choice of automation script is a fascinatingly bold departure from, well, the entirety of established computer science. It's like an aspiring novelist agonizing over the choice of word processor before having conceived of a plot, character, or theme. But the macro for inserting em-dashes is so elegant! A truly modern predicament.

I am particularly taken with the industry's collective sprint away from the "burden" of rigorous data integrity. They speak of "automating scaling" with the giddy excitement of a toddler discovering finger painting. And what a beautiful mess they make! It is a joy to watch them reinvent the wheel, only this time making it hexagonal for, one assumes, disruptive purposes. One can't help but admire their ingenuity in finding new and exciting ways to violate the most basic ACID properties.

• Atomicity? A charmingly quaint suggestion, but we have microservices! Transactions are now sagas, which is a wonderful literary term for a series of operations that will mostly, probably, succeed in some fashion, eventually.
• Consistency? My dear boy, we're building an AP system! As Brewer's CAP Theorem clearly proves—though most seem to have only read the title—you can simply choose to ignore consistency! It's an optional extra, like heated seats in a car.

And the operator itself! This... administrative side-channel that directly manipulates the database's environment. It is a stunningly effective method for ensuring that the system is thoroughly divorced from Codd's eighth rule of physical data independence. Why bother with the clean abstraction of a data sublanguage when you can just reach in and jiggle the wires directly? It is so much more "cloud native." Clearly they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on architectural principles; I suppose that's locked behind a "paywall" of requiring more than five minutes of focused attention.

...their underlying models yield vastly different outcomes.

One must applaud this insight. Indeed, a model based on sound mathematical principles and one based on a series of shell scripts glued together with YAML do yield different outcomes. One yields a robust, verifiable, and consistent system of record. The other yields a series of frantic Slack messages at 3:00 AM. It's a matter of taste, really.

I suppose I should be grateful. This relentless pursuit of operational convenience over theoretical soundness ensures a steady stream of bafflingly broken systems for my graduate students to write papers about. It is, shall we say, a self-perpetuating field of study. Still, one does get weary. They have built their cathedrals of data on shifting sands, and they are celebrating the efficiency of their shovels. What a time to be alive.