🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Oh, lovely. A leadership shuffle. I just read Dev’s heartfelt novella about his 'extraordinary expedition.' It’s touching, really. It brought a tear to my eye—mostly because I was calculating the budget variance a "new guide" is going to cost us. While they’re busy passing the climbing axe and patting each other on the back at the summit, I’m down here in base camp with the actual invoices. And let me tell you, this expedition is looking less like Everest and more like a trip to a financial black hole.

• First, let's talk about this "new guide," CJ. He comes from ServiceNow and Cloudflare, where he helped them scale to more than $10 billion in revenue. Fantastic. Do you know how a company scales to $10 billion? Not by giving customers discounts. This resume doesn’t scream 'I’m here to simplify your billing,' it screams 'I have a master's degree in finding new and exciting ways to charge you for API calls you didn't even know you were making.' We're not getting a new guide; we're getting a new, more efficient tollbooth operator for this "expedition."

• The memo gushes that MongoDB is ready for the rise of AI and MongoDB 3.0. I love that. In accounting, "perfectly positioned for AI" is code for a new, mandatory product tier that costs 40% more and is justified by a whitepaper full of vague promises about synergistic data actualization. It’s the enterprise software equivalent of putting "artisanal" on a block of cheese and tripling the price. I'm already anticipating the line item for "Intelligent Data Fabric Surcharge."

• Let’s do some quick back-of-the-napkin math on the True Cost of Ownership™ for this next glorious phase. Your initial Atlas quote is a cute little number, let's call it X. Now, we add the consultants needed to migrate to this "3.0" platform (2X), the mandatory retraining for our entire dev team who just got used to the last platform (0.5X), and the emergency "Platinum Enterprise Concierge" support package we'll inevitably need when a critical feature is deprecated with two weeks' notice (1.5X). So the "true" cost is at least 5X the sticker price. The ROI on this isn't a return on investment; it’s a receipt for institutional bankruptcy.

• I’m particularly fond of the metaphor of a "championship team refreshing its roster." That’s a good one. Because just like with a pro sports team, when a star player comes in, the ticket prices go up for the fans. We're the fans. This "refresh" means our next contract renewal negotiation will be a masterclass in creative fee generation.

  The company is primed for a new leader. One with a fresh perspective... A fresh perspective on our wallet, you mean. I can already see the proposal: a 25% base increase for the privilege of being part of this founding of a new moment. Thanks, but I'd prefer to be part of a moment where our database costs don't require a special session with the board of directors.

• Dev promises he’ll "hold on to my MongoDB stock." Of course he will! He knows the business model is a fortress of financial extraction. You don't sell your shares in a gold mine when you've just handed the keys to a guy famous for digging faster and deeper. It's not a vote of confidence in the technology; it's a vote of confidence in the unshakable reality of vendor lock-in.

Thanks for the update, I'll file this under "Reasons to Accelerate Our PostgreSQL Migration Study." I promise to never read this blog again.