Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, settle down, let me put my coffee down for this. I just had the marketing department send me this... this inspirational profile. Let's see here... "Alena Fereday, senior solution architect... channels her early love of coding..."
Oh, give me a break. A "Senior Solution Architect". Back in my day, we had two titles: "Programmer" and "Guy Who Yells at the Programmer When the Batch Job Fails." You knew who did what. This "architect" business sounds like someone who draws pretty diagrams on a whiteboard while the actual database groans under the weight of another unindexed, "schema-on-read" fantasy.
Love of coding? Adorable. My first "love of coding" was a stack of punch cards thick as a phone book. You'd spend a week writing your COBOL program, hand the deck over to the operators, and come back eight hours later to a single printout: IKF128I - SYNTAX ERROR ON LINE 487. There was no love. There was only fear, caffeine, and the cold, hard logic of the mainframe. You learned discipline, or you learned to sell insurance.
And this... this is my favorite part:
...a career marked by versatility and hands-on problem solving.
Versatility. That's what they call it now when you can't hold down a job on one platform for more than 18 months. I've been wrangling DB2 on z/OS since Reagan was in office. That's not versatility, son. That's mastery. You kids jump from MongoDB to Cassandra to this Elastic thingamajig faster than I can re-IPL the system. You're not versatile, you're just chasing whatever venture capitalist is throwing the most money at free lunches this quarter.
And "hands-on problem solving"? Let me tell you about "hands-on." "Hands-on" is when the automated tape library jams at 3 AM and you have to physically climb into the silo to unhook a 10-pound cartridge before the nightly backup window closes and the entire bank's transaction log is shot. "Hands-on" is squinting at a 3270 green-screen terminal, debugging a CICS transaction abend by reading a hexadecimal memory dump. I bet her idea of "hands-on" is dragging a new microservice icon onto a Kubernetes deployment chart. It's practically the same thing.
They're all so proud of this Elastic stuff. This "document-oriented" database. It's revolutionary, they say! They got rid of the schema! Brilliant!
You know what we called a database with no predefined schema in 1985? A flat file. A VSAM KSDS, if we were feeling fancy. You're bragging about inventing the digital equivalent of a disorganized filing cabinet. We solved this problem forty years ago with hierarchical databases like IMS, and then we perfected it with the relational model. You're not innovating; you're just speed-running through all of our old mistakes with more RAM and a prettier GUI.
I guarantee you, give it five years. Some "Principal Visionary Officer" is going to stand on a stage and announce a groundbreaking new technology. It'll enforce data integrity, use a structured query language, and ensure transactional consistency. They'll call it "Post-NoSQL" or "Relational-as-a-Service" and get a billion-dollar valuation for reinventing the wheel.
So, good for Alena and her "lifelong learning." I've been lifelong learning, too. I learned that new paint on an old shed doesn't stop the termites. And this whole NoSQL, "move fast and break things" fad is a termite-infested shed waiting for a strong wind. Mark my words, when their "versatile" solution finally collapses under its own schema-less weight, they'll be looking for some old relic who still remembers how to write a real CREATE TABLE statement.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a JCL script to debug. It's only been running for six hours. Probably just warming up.