🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

"PostgreSQL 18 is on the way, bringing a set of improvements that many organizations will find useful." Oh, "improvements," you say? Because what our balance sheet really needs is more ways for our budget to mysteriously evaporate into the cloud-native ether. Useful for whom, exactly? The shareholders of the managed database providers, I'd wager.

This article, bless its heart, talks about performance, replication, and simplifying daily operations. Simplifying whose operations, I ask you? Certainly not mine, as I stare down another multi-page invoice from some 'strategic partner' promising us the moon on a stick made of IOPS. They always gloss over the true cost, don't they? They'll tell you PostgreSQL is "free as in speech, free as in beer." I say it's free as in puppy. Cute at first, then it eats your furniture, and costs a fortune in vet bills and specialized training.

Let's talk about this mythical reduced TCO they all parrot. You want to migrate to this new, shiny, supposedly cheaper thing? Fine.

• First, you're looking at migration costs. Oh, it's not just a pg_dump and pg_restore, is it? Try:
  • Data cleansing and normalization (because your legacy data is a swamp of historical bad decisions).
  • Schema refactoring (because the "old way" isn't "cloud-optimized," whatever that buzzword means this week).
  • Application rewrite cycles that stretch longer than a Monday morning meeting in purgatory.
  • QA, performance tuning, security audits... Let's be conservative. For a non-trivial enterprise database, that's easily six months of a dedicated internal team. Say, five engineers at $150 an hour. That's $150 * 5 * 160 hours/month * 6 months = $720,000 just in internal labor, before you even look at third-party tooling.
• Then there's training. Your existing DBAs, who are perfectly competent, suddenly need to "upskill" on the "nuances" of the managed service's proprietary dashboard or the latest set of "best practices" from a consultant who charges by the word. That's another $25,000 for a few week-long courses, plus travel, per team.
• And, the inevitable, the inescapable, the gloriously profitable consultants. Oh, you've run into a "unique performance bottleneck" that only their "certified experts" can solve? They'll parachute in, charge $300 an hour, tell you to buy more RAM, and then declare victory after two weeks. That's $24,000 per consultant, and it's never just one. Always two, maybe three, for "knowledge transfer" that vanishes as soon as their invoice clears. Let's just pencil in $50,000 for the first "unique" issue.
• Now for the ongoing support and managed service fees. This is where the real trickery lies. "Just a little bit per GB, per IOPS, per connection, per backup snapshot, per restore point, per breath of digital air you consume!" It starts as a manageable dribble, but by month three, it's a roaring torrent that suddenly costs more than your entire on-prem infrastructure. For an enterprise database, we're talking $5,000 to $15,000 a month at minimum. That's $60,000 to $180,000 annually.

So, my quick back-of-napkin calculation for this "free" database, just for the first year of a moderate migration, ignoring the opportunity cost of pulling everyone off their actual jobs:

$720,000 (Migration Labor) + $25,000 (Training) + $50,000 (Consultants) + $100,000 (Annual Managed Service/Support)

= $895,000

And that's just for ONE significant database! They promise agility and innovation, but what I see is a gaping maw of recurring expenses. This isn't simplifying daily operations; it's simplifying their path to early retirement on my dime.

They talk about "PostgreSQL 18 moving things in a good direction." Good direction for their bottom line, absolutely. The vendor lock-in isn't in the database code itself, oh no. It's in the specialized tooling, the proprietary APIs of their managed services, the "deep integration" with their specific cloud flavor, and the fact that once you've poured almost a million dollars into migrating, you're effectively chained to their ecosystem. Try moving off their managed PostgreSQL service. It's like trying to pull Excalibur from the stone, only Excalibur is rusted, covered in cryptic error messages, and charges by the hour for every tug.

My prediction? We'll spend more on this "free" database than we did on our last proprietary monstrosity, and then some. Next year's earnings call will feature me explaining why our "strategic infrastructure investment" has inexplicably shrunk our EBITDA like a cheap suit in a hot wash. Don't tell me about ROI when the only thing I'm seeing return is my blood pressure.