🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Alright team, gather ‘round. I’ve just finished reading the latest dispatch from the land of make-believe, where servers are always synchronized and network latency is a polite suggestion. This paper on "Tiga" is another beautiful exploration of the dream of a one-round commit. A dream. You know what else is a dream? A budget that balances itself. Let’s not confuse fantasy with a viable Q4 strategy.

They say this isn't a "conceptual breakthrough," just a "thoughtful piece of engineering." That’s vendor-speak for, “We polished the chrome on the same engine that’s failed for a decade, and now we’re calling it a new car.” The big idea is that it commits transactions in one round-trip "most of the time." That phrase—"most of the time"—is the most expensive phrase in enterprise technology. It’s the asterisk at the end of the contract that costs us seven figures in "professional services" two years down the line.

The whole thing hinges on predicting the future. It assigns a transaction a "future timestamp" based on an equation that includes a little fudge factor, a "Δ" they call a "small safety headroom." Let me translate that into terms this department understands. That’s the financial equivalent of building a forecast by taking last year's revenue, adding a "synergy" multiplier, and hoping for the best. When has that ever worked? We're supposed to bet the company's data integrity on synchronized clocks and a 10-millisecond guess? My pacemaker has a better SLA.

They sell you on the "fast path." The sunny day scenario. Three simple steps, 1-WRTT, and everyone’s happy. The PowerPoint slides will be gorgeous. But then you scroll down. You always have to scroll down.

Suddenly, we’re in the weeds of steps four, five, and six. The "slow path." This is where the magic dies and the invoices begin.

Timestamp Agreement: Sometimes leaders execute with slightly different timestamps... Log Synchronization: After leaders finalize timestamps, they propagate the consistent log... Quorum Check of Slow Path: Finally, the coordinator verifies that enough followers have acknowledged...

Sometimes. You see how they slip that in? At our scale, "sometimes" means every third Tuesday and any time we run a promotion. Each of those steps—"exchanging timestamps," "revoking execution," "propagating logs"—isn't just a half-a-round-trip. It's a support ticket. It's a late-night call with a consultant from Bangalore who costs more per hour than our entire engineering intern program.

Let’s do some real math here, the kind they don't put in the whitepaper. The back-of-the-napkin P&L.

• Sticker Price: Let's call it $X. They’ll probably even give us a "discount."
• Migration: Our current system is a tangled, horrifying mess, but it’s our mess. Moving our petabytes of data to this new, "thoughtfully engineered" system will require a team of 10 engineers working for 18 months. That’s at least $2.5 million in salaries, benefits, and the opportunity cost of them not building features that actually make us money.
• Training: Our people know the old system. Now they need to become experts in "deadline-ordered multicast" and "super quorums." That's a week of off-site training in Palo Alto for 20 people. Add another $150,000 for flights, hotels, and a team-building exercise that involves trust falls and organic kombucha.
• The "Slow Path" Consultants: When—not if—we hit the "slow path" during peak traffic, we won’t know how to fix it. We’ll have to bring in the Tiga-certified "Optimization Gurus." At $800/hour, with a six-month minimum retainer, we’re looking at another $800,000 just to keep the lights on.
• Infrastructure Overhead: Oh, this runs beautifully on "modern clocks" and pristine Google Cloud infrastructure? Fantastic. Our on-prem data centers are powered by hamsters on wheels and held together with duct tape. The hardware upgrade to get the "nanosecond precision" this thing needs will cost more than the software itself. Let’s pencil in $3 million for that.

So, the "True Cost of Tiga" isn’t $X. It’s $X + $6.45 million, before we've even handled a single transaction.

And for what? The evaluation claims it’s "1.3–7x" faster in "low-contention microbenchmarks." That is the most meaningless metric I have ever heard. That's like bragging that your new Ferrari is faster than a unicycle in an empty parking lot. Our production environment isn't a low-contention microbenchmark. It's a high-contention warzone. It's Black Friday traffic hitting a Monday morning batch job. Their benchmark is a lie, and they're using it to sell us a mortgage on a fantasy.

They say it beats Calvin+. Great. They replaced one academic consensus protocol with another. Who cares? This isn't a science fair. This is a business. Show me the ROI on that $6.45 million initial investment. If we get 2x throughput, does that mean we double our revenue? Of course not. It means we can process customer complaints twice as fast before the system falls over into its "graceful" 1.5-2 WRTT slow path. By my math, this thing doesn't pay for itself until the heat death of the universe.

Honestly, at this point, I’m convinced the entire distributed database industry is an elaborate scheme to sell consulting hours. Every new paper, every new "revolutionary" protocol is just another chapter in the same, tired story. They promise speed, we get complexity. They promise savings, we get vendor lock-in. They promise a one-round trip to the future, and we end up taking the long, slow, expensive road to the exact same place.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go approve a PO for more duct tape for the server racks. It has a better, and more predictable, ROI.