🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Oh, how wonderful. A “detailed account” of the outage. Let me just grab my coffee and settle in for this corporate bedtime story. I’m sure it’s a riveting tale of synergistic resilience failures and a paradigm-shifting learning opportunity. It’s always a “learning opportunity” when it’s my money burning, isn’t it? Funny how that works.

They start with a sincere-sounding apology for the “inconvenience.” Inconvenience? Our entire e-commerce platform was a smoking crater for six hours. That’s not an inconvenience; that’s six hours of seven-figure revenue flushed directly down a non-redundant, single-point-of-failure toilet. My Q1 forecast just shed a tear.

But my favorite part is always the "What We Are Doing" section. It's never just "we fixed the bug." Oh no, that would be far too simple and, more importantly, free. Instead, it’s a beautifully crafted upsell disguised as a solution. They talk about their new Geo-Resilient Hyper-Availability Zone™, which, by a shocking coincidence, is only available on their new Enterprise-Ultra-Mega-Premium tier. For a nominal fee, of course.

Let’s do some quick math on the back of this now-useless P.O., shall we? I seem to recall the sales pitch. It was a masterpiece of financial fiction. They promised a predictable, all-in cost that would revolutionize our TCO.

Let's calculate the real cost of this "revolutionary" database, what I like to call the Goldman Standard Cost of Regret.

• The Sticker Price: The number they actually showed us in the proposal. Let's call it $500,000 a year. Quaint.
• The Migration Tax: They promised a "seamless lift and shift." It took six engineers four months. That’s $450,000 in salary and benefits we can light on fire, right there.
• The "Certification" Racket: Our team, brilliant as they are, couldn't make sense of the proprietary query language. So we had to send them for "official training." Another $75,000 for lukewarm coffee and a three-day PowerPoint presentation.
• The Inevitable Consultants: When the training didn’t stick, we had to hire their "platinum-certified implementation partners" at $500 an hour just to get our indexing to work. Let’s budget a conservative $150,000 for those life-savers.
• The "Oopsie" Fee: And now, after this little outage, they’re gently suggesting we need their new Geo-Resilient whatever. A quick look at the pricing calculator shows this will double our compute and egress costs. So, add another $500,000 to the annual bill to protect us… from them.

So, the "predictable" $500,000 annual cost is actually $1.675 million for the first year, and a cool $1 million every year after that. And for what? So I can read a blog post explaining how they’re “doubling down on operational excellence.”

They had a chart in their sales deck, I remember it vividly. It had an arrow labeled "5x ROI" shooting up to the moon. My back-of-the-napkin math shows an ROI of approximately negative 200%. At this rate, their "solution" will bankrupt the company by Q3 of next year. It's a bold strategy for customer retention, I'll give them that. You can't churn if your business no longer exists.

We are committed to rebuilding the trust we may have eroded.

You didn’t erode my trust. You took it out behind the woodshed, charged me for the ammunition, and then sent me a bill for the cleanup. The only thing you're "rebuilding" is a more expensive prison of vendor lock-in, brick by proprietary brick.

Bless their hearts for trying. Anyway, I’m forwarding this post-mortem to legal and adding their blog's domain to my firewall. Not for security, mind you, but for the preservation of my fiscal sanity.