🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Alright, let's see what the "thought leaders" are peddling this week. “How does your computer create the illusion of running dozens of applications simultaneously…?”

Oh, that’s a fantastic question. It’s almost identical to the one I ask every time a database vendor pitches me: “How do you create the illusion of a cost-effective solution when it’s architected to bankrupt a small nation?” The answer, it seems, is the same: a clever bit of misdirection and a whole lot of taking away control.

They call it “Limited Direct Execution.” I call it the enterprise software business model. They love the “Direct Execution” part—that’s the demo. “Look how fast it runs! It’s running natively on your CPU! Pure performance!” They glide right over the “Limited” part, which is, of course, where the entire business strategy lives. That’s the fine print in the 80-page EULA that says we, the customer, are stuck in “User Mode.” We can’t perform any “privileged actions” like, say, exporting our own data without their proprietary connector, or scaling without their approval, or, God forbid, performing our own I/O without triggering a billing event.

The vendor, naturally, operates exclusively in “Kernel Mode,” with full, unfettered access to the machine—and by machine, I mean our corporate credit card. And how do we ask for permission to do anything useful? We initiate a “System Call.” I love that. It sounds so official. For us, a “System Call” is a support ticket that takes three days to get a response, which then “triggers a ‘trap’ instruction that jumps into the kernel.” That “trap,” of course, is a professional services engagement that costs $450 an hour and gives them the “raised privilege level” to fix the problem they designed into the system. It’s a beautiful, self-sustaining ecosystem of pain.

And what happens if our team gets stuck in an “infinite loop” trying to make this thing work? The old “Cooperative Approach” is dead—no vendor trusts you to yield control. Instead, they use a “Timer Interrupt.” For us, that’s the quarterly license audit that “forcefully halts the process” and demands we justify every core we’ve allocated. It’s their way of “regaining control” and ensuring we haven't accidentally found a way to be efficient.

But my favorite part, the real masterpiece of financial extraction, is the “context switch.” This is what they sell you as “migration” or “upgrading.” They describe it as a “low-level assembly routine.” Translation: you will need to hire their three most expensive consultants, who are the only people on Earth who understand it. Let’s do some quick, back-of-the-napkin math on the “true cost” of one of these “context switches” they gloss over so elegantly:

By switching the stack pointer, the OS tricks the hardware: the 'return-from-trap' instruction returns into the new process instead of the old one.

Tricks the hardware? Adorable. They’re tricking the CFO. Let's calculate the "True Cost of Ownership" for this little magic trick:

• Consulting Fees: "Low-level assembly" means a minimum 6-month engagement at $30k/month per consultant. We'll need two. That's $360,000.
• Data Migration Fees: They'll charge us to "save the current process's registers" (data egress fees) and again to "restore the next process's registers" (data ingress fees). Let's be conservative and say $150,000.
• Team Training: Our entire engineering team needs to learn this new, “optimal” way of doing things. That’s another $200,000 in courses and lost productivity.
• Downtime During Switchover: Let’s estimate 8 hours of critical system downtime at $250,000/hour. That's a cool $2,000,000.
• The "Unexpected Complications" Retainer: Because there are always complications. A contingency of $500,000 seems prudent.

So, their simple, one-paragraph “context switch” will only cost us $3,210,000. And they sell this with a straight face, promising a 20% improvement in “turnaround time,” their pet metric for ROI. A 20% gain on a million-dollar process is $200k. So we’re just over three million in the hole. Fantastic.

Then they hit us with the pricing models, disguised here as “scheduling policies.” FIFO is their standard support queue. SJF, or “Shortest Job First,” is their premium support tier, where you pay extra to have your emergency ticket answered before someone else’s. And STCF is the hyper-premium, platinum-plus package where they preempt their other cash cows to help you, for a fee that could fund a moon mission.

But the real killer is Round Robin. This is the cloud consumption model. They give you a tiny “time-slice” and then switch to another task, so the system feels responsive. Meanwhile, they are billing you for every single switch, every nanosecond of compute, and every byte transferred. The article says this model “destroys turnaround time.” You don’t say. My projects now take twelve months instead of three, but my monthly bill is wonderfully granular and arrives every hour. As they so cheerfully put it, “You cannot have your cake and eat it too.” Translation: You can have a responsive system or you can have a solvent company. Pick one.

The final, glorious confession is this: the OS does not actually know how long a job will run. They call this the "No Oracle" problem. This is the single most honest sentence in the entire piece. They have no idea what our workload is. They are guessing. Their solution? A “Multi-Level Feedback Queue” that “predicts the future by observing the past.” I’ve seen this one before. It’s called “annual price optimization,” where they look at which features you used last year and triple the price.

So, to conclude, this has been a wonderful look into the vendor playbook. It’s a masterclass in feigning simplicity while engineering financial complexity. The best policy, as they say, depends on the workload. And my workload is to protect this company’s money.

Thank you for the article. I will now go ensure it is blocked on the company firewall so none of my engineers get any bright ideas.