Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, team, I just finished reading another one of those vendor love letters to themselves, the kind that talks about “philosophy” and “integrity” when they should be talking about per-core licensing fees. They seem to believe quoting Francis Bacon makes their pricing model any less predatory. In the spirit of the openness and honesty they preach, let's sharpen our pencils and take a closer look at this masterpiece of fiscal misdirection.
First, we have the "Open Source Philosophy" Smokescreen. It’s a beautiful sentiment, truly. It evokes images of a digital barn-raising, everyone chipping in for the common good. The problem is, the barn they want us to use has a secret, members-only VIP lounge called the "Enterprise Edition," and the entrance fee is our entire Q4 budget. Their "philosophy" is free, but the features that actually prevent the database from melting into a puddle of ones and zeroes—like backups, security, and support that isn't just a link to an unanswered forum post from 2017—will cost us dearly. It’s like a free car that comes without an engine.
Then there's the siren song of "No Vendor Lock-In." They whisper this sweet nothing while their proprietary APIs and "performance-enhancing extensions" wrap around our tech stack like an anaconda. They tell you, "Oh, but the core is open! You can leave anytime!" Sure. And I can theoretically build my own particle accelerator in the breakroom. The reality is, once we're in, extricating our data and rewriting our applications to work with anything else would be a multi-year, multi-million-dollar death march. It's less of a database and more of the Hotel California of data storage.
Let's do some quick, CFO-approved, back-of-the-napkin math on the "True Cost of Ownership™," shall we? They love to wave around a big, beautiful "$0" for the community license. Fantastic. Now, let’s add the reality:
So, our "free" database actually starts with a down payment of over half a million dollars before we’ve stored a single customer record.
This brings me to my favorite piece of fiction: the Return on Investment (ROI) Slide. I've seen their deck. It promises a 500% ROI by EOY, driven by "unprecedented developer velocity." Let's apply my numbers. We're starting $700k in the hole (initial cost + first year of support). The promised "velocity" might save us, what, two developer-weeks of effort? That’s about $15,000 in saved salary. So our ROI is... checks calculator... approximately negative 98%. At this rate, we won't be innovating; we'll be auctioning off the office ferns by Q3 to make payroll.
And finally, the sheer audacity of their pricing model for the managed service, which I can only describe as Quantum Voodoo Economics. They don't charge per server or per gigabyte; that would be too simple, too honest. Instead, they charge based on an abstract unit they invented, calculated by the number of queries multiplied by the CPU cycles, divided by the current phase of the moon. They claim it "aligns cost with value." What it actually does is make our bill as predictable as a lightning strike and ensures that any success or growth we experience is immediately punished with an exponentially larger invoice.
Honestly, at this point, I'm considering moving our entire ledger to a series of interconnected spreadsheets run on a Commodore 64. The total cost of ownership would be more predictable. Sigh. At least then, the only person treating my money like Monopoly cash would be me.