🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Alright, settle down, whippersnappers. Let me get my reading glasses. My, my... what a fascinating piece of digital archaeology. You've really gone and done it this time. It's just... breathtaking.

I must applaud the bold, forward-thinking design that requires a kernel-level system call trace just to figure out which file your "users" collection is being written to. It’s a level of operational security through obscurity I haven't seen since we used to EBCDIC-encode the file headers on the mainframe just to keep the night shift operators from getting any bright ideas. You kids and your strace... back in my day, if you wanted to see I/O, you watched the blinking lights on the disk array cabinet. Each blink was a story, son. A beautiful, simple story.

And these filenames! Just look at them.

collection-7e76acd8-718e-4fd6-93f2-fd08eaac3ed1.wt

That’s not a filename, that's my social security number after a run-in with a paper shredder. It’s truly innovative. You've managed to create a filesystem that looks like it's already been corrupted. It reminds me of the time we dropped a stack of punch cards for the quarterly payroll run. We had to sort them by hand, but at least the cards were labeled PAYROLL-Q3-1987. You have to write a whole new program just to read the labels on your digital cards. Progress.

But this script... oh, this script is the chef's kiss. It's a masterclass in modern problem-solving. You've built a system so abstract that to understand what it's doing, you have to... ask the system what it's doing. It's like calling the fire department to ask them if the smoke you're seeing is, in fact, coming from your own house which is currently on fire. The sheer genius of needing a JavaScript applet to interpret the output of your diagnostic tool is... well, it's certainly a choice. We used to have a three-ring binder with the VSAM file layouts printed out. We called it a "data dictionary." Looks like you've reinvented it, but with more steps and a distinct odor of NodeJS.

And I see you're discovering all the little helper "collections" that this magnificent engine needs just to stay on the rails. Let's see here:

• pre/post-image documents for retryable operations: You mean... a transaction log? A before-and-after journal? Honey, IMS was doing that in 1982. We'd write it to nine-track tape reels the size of a manhole cover. If the system crashed, you'd just restore the master tape and roll the journal forward. It took all weekend and the machine room sounded like a jet engine, but it worked.
• tracks session transaction state: Adorable. You've implemented a rudimentary two-phase commit coordinator. DB2 had that while your founders were still in diapers. We didn't call it a "collection," we called it the "log manager," because we named things based on what they did.
• a capped collection containing all replication operations: So, a circular buffer. We used those for console logs on the System/370. It was revolutionary then, too.

It’s just wonderful to see all these old, proven ideas being rediscovered and given such agile, web-scale names. You're not just writing data; you're embarking on an epic adventure of discovery every time you want to find it again.

This whole setup is a beautiful, fragile house of cards built on a swamp of JavaScript promises. I give it 18 months before the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own cleverness. Someone will accidentally delete the collection that remembers what the other collections are named, and you'll be left with a directory full of gibberish and a résumé to update.

Call me when you kids rediscover indexed sequential access methods. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go rotate my backup tapes. They don't sort themselves, you know.