🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Ah, yes, another end-of-year victory lap blog post. Time flies when you’re having fun, they say. Or when you’re staring at a migration script progress bar at 4 AM, mainlining cold brew and praying the rollback plan you wrote on a napkin actually works. But sure, let’s celebrate MongoDB’s obsession with customers. As one of those customers—or at least, the poor soul who has to implement the whims of those customers—I can confirm the obsession is real. My pager feels it every single weekend.

So, what have we been blessed with this year? The acquisition of Voyage AI to enhance accuracy and solve LLM hallucinations. Fantastic. My last project had hallucinations because of a race condition in a caching layer from 2018 that nobody dares touch. But yes, let’s slap some advanced retrieval technology on it. I’m sure that won't introduce any new, excitingly opaque failure modes. “Why is the AI recommending we replace our entire payment gateway with a potato? I don’t know, the embeddings feel right!”

And then we have MongoDB AMP, the AI-powered Application Modernization Platform. Oh, I love this. It’s got "a proven delivery framework" and "expert guidance." Let me translate: it’s a fancy script generator and a consultant who will charge you my salary per hour to tell you what you already know.

…modernize 2-3 times faster.

Faster than what? The heat death of the universe? My last "simple" modernization project involved discovering that our core user data was being stored in a custom-built, undocumented binary format inside a single, massive JSON document. But sure, AMP me up. I’m ready for my technical debt to be transformed into AI-powered technical debt. It’s the same mess, just with a higher AWS bill.

Of course, they’ve finally added vector search to the on-prem versions. How generous. So now I can build the next-generation RAG application that my VP of Whatever read about on a flight, and I can test it locally before realizing our on-prem hardware can’t handle the indexing load and the whole thing catches fire. At least I can now create a hybrid-deployment security vulnerability from the comfort of my own data center. Progress.

Let’s not forget the customer success stories. McKesson scaled 300x and managed 1.2 billion containers annually without latency. Without latency. I want to see those p99 graphs. I want to see the on-call rotation schedule for the team that supports that. "Without latency" is the biggest lie in tech since "this is a temporary fix." I bet their engineers have the same thousand-yard stare I developed during the Great Shard Key Debacle of ‘22.

And the corporate poetry, oh, it’s beautiful. MongoDB has gone from a "niche NoSQL solution to a trusted enterprise standard" through a "sustained and deliberate engineering effort." That’s a lovely way of saying "we finally bolted on the basic features like ACID transactions that you’ve had in Postgres for twenty years, after a decade of telling us we ‘just didn’t get the document model.’" We got it. We also got data loss.

But the absolute peak, the pièce de résistance, is this gem from the new SVP of Core Products:

"In 2026, cloud independence will evolve from strategic preference to existential imperative... The defining competitive advantage will belong to organizations that transcend fragile prevention theater and engineer true infrastructural resilience..."

Let me translate this from LinkedIn PowerPoint into English for you. "Fragile prevention theater" is what you're doing right now. "True infrastructural resilience" is what you'll supposedly get when you pay us for more services to manage the multi-cloud migration nightmare he’s prescribing. He’s not selling a solution; he's selling you a whole new category of enterprise-grade anxiety. He wants you to build a system so complex, with "AI-orchestrated redundancy," that when it inevitably fails, it will do so in ways so spectacular and incomprehensible that no single human can debug it. It’s not about preventing downtime; it’s about making downtime a distributed, existential crisis.

So, a new CEO, a new "data revolution," a new set of buzzwords for the VPs to chant in their all-hands meetings. It all leads to the same place: my desk, at 3 AM, with a half-finished migration script and a Slack channel full of red alerts.

Great. Another revolution. Just… page someone else this time.