Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Ah, marvelous. They've finally bestowed upon MySQL the grand title of "Long-Term Support." One must applaud the sheer audacity. It’s akin to celebrating that a bridge you've been building for two decades might, at long last, stop wobbling in a stiff breeze. "Great news for all of us who value stability," they say. One presumes the previous thirty years were just a whimsical experiment in managed chaos.
This entire spectacle is a symptom of a deeply pernicious trend. They speak of an "enterprise-ready platform" as if it were some new-found treasure, a revolutionary concept just discovered. What, precisely, were they offering before? A hobbyist's plaything? It seems the "enterprise" has become a synonym for "we'll promise not to break your mission-critical systems for at least a few fiscal quarters." How reassuring.
The very need for an "LTS" release exposes the intellectual bankruptcy of the modern development cycle. A database system, if designed with even a modicum of rigor, should be stable by its very nature. Its principles should be axiomatic, not subject to the fleeting whims of quarterly feature sprints. But no, they bolt on "innovations" that would make Edgar Codd turn in his grave, then act surprised when the whole precarious Jenga tower needs a "stabilization" release.
I can only imagine the sort of "features" this new, stable platform will enshrine:
They speak of predictability. What is predictable is their flagrant disregard for the fundamentals. They speak of "availability" and "scalability," chanting mantras they picked up from some dreadful conference keynote. Clearly, they've never grappled with the implications of the CAP theorem; they simply treat Consistency as the awkward guest at the party they hope will leave early so the real fun can begin.
"a more predictable, enterprise-ready platform"
This isn't innovation; it's an apology. It's a tacit admission that their previous work was a series of frantic sprints away from sound computer science principles. It's the inevitable result of a culture where no one reads the papers anymore. You can practically hear the product managers asking, "Why bother with isolation levels when we can just throw more pods at it?" Clearly, they've never read Stonebraker's seminal work on the architecture of database systems, or they'd understand they are solving yesterday's problems with tomorrow's over-engineered and fundamentally unsound solutions.
So, let them have their "LTS" release. Let the industry celebrate this monument to its own short-sightedness. I shall be in my office, re-reading Codd's 1970 paper, and quietly weeping for a field that has mistaken marketing cycles for progress. Enterprise-ready, indeed. Hmph.