Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, settle down, kids. Let me put on my reading glasses. My real glasses, not the blue-light filtering ones you all wear to protect your eyes from the soothing glow of your YAML files. I just got forwarded this link by a project manager whose entire technical vocabulary consists of "synergy" and "the cloud." Let's see what fresh-faced genius has reinvented the wheel this week.
"Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights to analyze your SQL execution plan..."
Oh, this is just fantastic. I mean, truly. The colors on the dashboard are so vibrant. It's a real feast for the eyes. Back in my day, we had to analyze performance by printing out a hundred pages of query traces on green bar paper, and the only "insight" we got was a paper cut and a stern look from the operations manager about the printer budget. You've managed to turn that entire, tactile experience into a series of clickable widgets. Progress.
It's just so innovative how this tool helps you troubleshoot and optimize your SQL. I'm sitting here wondering how we ever managed before. Usually, I'd just type EXPLAIN ANALYZE, read the output that the database has been providing for, oh, thirty years or so, and then fix the query. But that process always felt like it was missing something. Now I know what it was: a monthly bill calculated by the millisecond.
The way it shows you the query plan visually is just darling. It reminds me of the performance analyzer we had for DB2 on the MVS mainframe, circa 1988. Of course, that was a monochrome text interface that made your eyes bleed, and you had to submit a batch job in JCL to run it, but the concept... practically identical. It's amazing how if you wait long enough, every "new" idea from the 80s comes back with a prettier UI and a subscription fee.
"analyze your SQL execution plan to troubleshoot and optimize your SQL query performance in an Aurora PostgreSQL cluster."
You can do that now? With a computer? Astonishing. I thought that was what they paid me for. Silly me. I remember one time, back in '92, we had a billing run that was taking 18 hours instead of the usual six. We didn't have "Database Insights." We had a COBOL program, a pot of stale coffee, and the looming threat of the CFO standing behind us, asking if the checks were going to be printed on time. We found the problem—a Cartesian product that was trying to join every customer with every invoice ever created. Our "insight" was a single line of code that we fixed after tracing the logic on a whiteboard for two hours. I guess now you'd just get a little red exclamation point on a graph. So much more efficient.
It's heartening to see the young generation tackling these tough problems. The amount of engineering that must have gone into creating a web page that reads a text file and draws boxes and arrows from it... I'm in awe. We used to have to do that in our heads. We also had to manage tape backups, where "restoring a database" meant finding a guy named Stan who knew which dusty corner of the data center the backup from last Tuesday was physically sitting in, praying the tape hadn't been demagnetized by the microwave in the breakroom. Your point-in-time recovery button has really taken the romance out of disaster recovery.
So, yes, a hearty congratulations on this blog post. It’s a wonderful summary of a product that elegantly solves a problem that’s been solved since before most of its developers were born. The screenshots are lovely. The prose is... present.
Thank you for the education. I will be sure to file this away with my punch cards and my manual on hierarchical database transac—oh, who am I kidding? I'm never going to read your blog again. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go yell at a query that thinks a full table scan on an indexed column is a good idea. Some things never change.
Sincerely,
Rick "The Relic" Thompson Senior DBA (and part-time VAX cluster therapist)