🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Ah, another dispatch from the front lines of industry. How… quaint. One must applaud the sheer bravery on display. Percona, standing resolute, a veritable Horatius at the bridge, defending… checks notes… LDAP authentication. My, the stakes have never been higher. It’s like watching two children argue over who gets to use the red crayon, blissfully unaware that their entire drawing is a chaotic, finger-painted smear that violates every known principle of composition and form.

The true comedy here isn’t the trivial feature-shuffling between these… vendors. It is the spectacular, almost theatrical, ignorance of the foundation upon which they've built their competing sandcastles. They speak of "enterprise software" and "foundational identity protocols," yet they build upon a platform that treats data consistency as a charming, almost optional, suggestion. One has to wonder, do any of them still read? Or is all knowledge now absorbed through 280-character epiphanies and brightly colored slide decks?

They champion MongoDB, a system that in its very architecture is a rebellion against rigor. A "document store," they call it. What a charming euphemism for a digital junk drawer. It’s a flagrant dismissal of everything Codd fought for. Where is the relational algebra? Where are the normal forms? Gone, sacrificed at the altar of "developer velocity"—a term that seems to be corporate jargon for "we can't be bothered to design a schema." They've traded the mathematical elegance of the relational model for the ability to stuff unstructured nonsense into a JSON blob and call it innovation.

And the consequences are, as always, predictable to anyone with a modicum of theoretical grounding. They eventually run headlong into the brick wall of reality and are forced to bolt on features that were inherent to properly designed systems from the beginning.

At Percona, we’re taking a different path.

A different path? My dear chap, you're all trudging down the same muddy track, paved with denormalized data and wishful thinking. You're simply arguing about which brand of boots to wear on the journey. You celebrate adding a feature to a system that fundamentally misunderstands transactional integrity. I’m sure your users appreciate the robust authentication on their way to experiencing a race condition.

They love to invoke the CAP theorem, don't they? They brandish it like a holy text to justify their sins of "eventual consistency." Eventually consistent. It’s the most pernicious phrase in modern computing. It means, "We have absolutely no idea what the state of your data is right now, but we're reasonably sure it will be correct at some unspecified point in the future, maybe." Clearly they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work critiquing the very premise; they simply saw a convenient triangle diagram in a conference talk and decided that the 'C' for Consistency was the easiest to discard. It’s an intellectual get-out-of-jail-free card for shoddy engineering.

So, by all means, squabble over LDAP. Feel proud of your particular flavor of NoSQL. I shall be watching from the sidelines, sipping my tea. I give it five years before some bright-eyed startup "disrupts" the industry by inventing a system with pre-defined schemas, transactional guarantees, and a declarative query language. They’ll call it ‘Schema-on-Write Agile Data Structuring’ or some other such nonsense, and the venture capitalists will praise them for their revolutionary vision. And we, in academia, will simply sigh and file it under ‘Inevitable Rediscoveries, sub-section Codd.’