Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, settled in with my Sanka and the reading glasses I found clipped to my terminal. Let's see what the whippersnappers are bragging about today. Oh, an article from a young fella at Elastic. This should be good.
Well, I have to hand it to you, Matt. This is a truly fascinating piece of writing. It’s always a treat to see the next generation discover problems we were solving while you were still trying to figure out how Legos work. The sheer enthusiasm you have for "shaping how external data flows into Elasticsearch" is just... charming. It’s like watching a toddler discover his own feet. Look at that! They're at the end of my legs! I can wiggle them!
shaping how external data flows into Elasticsearch
Back in my day, we didn't have data that "flowed." That sounds like a plumbing problem. Data was delivered, with purpose and discipline, on a 9-track tape that weighed about five pounds. You didn't "shape" it on the fly. You wrote a 500-line COBOL program with a DATA DIVISION so meticulously structured it could serve as a legal document. You fed a deck of punch cards into a reader, submitted the JCL, and came back the next morning to see if the batch job had failed because of a misplaced comma. We called it "data processing," not "data yoga."
It's the ingenuity that really gets me. This idea of taking messy, unstructured data and making it searchable... it's a monumental achievement of modern computing. It's almost as impressive as the B-tree indexes we were using in VSAM files on the mainframe in 1983. You kids have your JSON documents, with their flexible, free-wheeling schemas. We had COPYBOOKs. You misalign one field by a single byte in a COPYBOOK, and the whole payroll run for a Fortune 500 company would spew garbage. It taught you a certain... respect for data integrity. A respect that seems to have been replaced with a philosophy of “eh, just throw it in the JSON lake and we’ll figure it out later.”
You talk about making this data usable in Elasticsearch. I tell you, this whole thing sounds suspiciously like what we were doing with DB2 and IMS back when a "user interface" was a 3270 green-screen terminal that made a delightful thwack sound with every keystroke. We had:
You've just wrapped it all up in a shiny new box, given it a name that sounds like a pair of sweatpants, and now you’re selling it as a revolution. It's like you reinvented the wheel and are now marketing it as a "synergistic, circular transport solution."
I'll admit, your solution is probably faster than swapping tape reels for a three-hour backup process, a process that wasn't complete until you drove the tapes to an off-site storage facility that was probably a decommissioned salt mine in Pennsylvania. But at least when our database went down, we had a physical object to blame. You can’t get cathartically angry at a distributed cluster that's having a "split-brain" problem. I could, however, get very angry at a tape drive that decided to eat my master customer file for breakfast. Much more satisfying.
So, bravo, Matt. Keep on "shaping" that "flow." It’s heartening to see you all tackling these brand-new, 40-year-old problems with such vigor. I’m sure in another ten years, you’ll discover the magic of referential integrity and call it "Relational Document Linking," patent it, and make a billion dollars.
Now if you'll excuse me, I think there's a VAX in a museum somewhere that needs rebooting, and I'm the only one left who remembers how.