Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, I’ve just printed out this… charming little computer science lesson from our friends at PlanetScale. It seems they think the key to our quarterly budget is a remedial course on how a computer turns on. While I appreciate the pretty diagrams, my job isn't to admire the cleverness of fork(), it's to make sure the only thing forking is our server traffic, not nine-figure checks to a vendor who thinks "value-add" is explaining what RAM is.
Let's break down this masterpiece of content marketing, shall we?
First, we have the "free" education that comes with a six-figure invoice attached. This whole article is a beautifully illustrated, 2,000-word justification for a problem I wasn't aware we had. They spend paragraphs explaining how Postgres is built on a "problematic" architecture—oh, the horror, it uses processes!—before casually mentioning their new managed Postgres service. This isn't a blog post; it's the free tote bag they give you before the high-pressure timeshare presentation. They're trying to sell me a cure for a disease they just invented, and I suspect the prescription is prohibitively expensive.
They make a grand show of the performance penalty of a context switch, breathlessly revealing it takes a whole ~5 microseconds. Five millionths of a second. Let me do some quick math. If a switch happens, say, once every 10 milliseconds, that’s 100 switches a second. Across a full 24-hour day, that's 8,640,000 switches. The total "wasted" time? A catastrophic 43.2 seconds. I've spent more time than that listening to their sales reps use the word "synergy." They're trying to sell me a Bugatti to solve a problem that amounts to a slightly squeaky grocery cart wheel.
Let’s calculate the "True Cost of Ownership," because it's certainly not on their pricing page. The sticker price is just the appetizer. First, you have the Migration Project, which will require three engineers for four months and a specialist consultant who bills at the same rate as a heart surgeon. Let's call that $250,000. Then comes Retraining, because our team now has to learn the "PlanetScale way" of doing things they already knew how to do. Add another $50,000 in lost productivity. And we can't forget the inevitable "Optimization & Best Practices" consulting package they'll sell us in six months when we can't figure out their proprietary dashboard. That’s an easy $75,000. So their "elegant solution" to save us a few microseconds is already costing us $375,000 before we've even paid the first monthly bill.
The entire premise is built on the fantasy of infinite scale, but the only thing they're really scaling is vendor lock-in. They’re pitching a managed service that abstracts away the complexity. Translation: They're putting our most valuable asset—our data—inside a black box with a convenient API. Trying to migrate off this platform in two years will be like trying to unscramble an egg. They’re not selling a better database; they’re selling a gilded cage, and the price of convenience today is a total lack of leverage tomorrow.
"PlanetScale Postgres is now generally available and it's the fastest way to run Postgres in the cloud." Yes, and a piranha-filled moat is the fastest way to secure your castle. Doesn't mean it's a good idea.
I'll be in my office, sharpening pencils. Send in the next vendor.