Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Well, look what the cat dragged in from the server rack. Another blog post heralding the "significant advances" in a technology we had working forty years ago. Logical replication? Adorable. You kids slap a new name on an old idea, write a thousand lines of YAML to configure it, and act like you've just split the atom. Let me pour some stale coffee and tell you what an old-timer thinks of your "powerful approach."
First off, you’re celebrating a feature whose main selling point seems to be that it breaks. This entire article exists because your shiny new "logical replication" stalls. Back in my day, we had something similar. It was called shipping transaction logs via a station wagon to an off-site facility. When it "stalled," it meant Steve from operations got a flat tire. The fix wasn't a blog post; it was a call to AAA. At least our single point of failure was grease-stained and could tell a decent joke.
You talk about an "extremely powerful approach" to fixing this. Son, "powerful" is when the lights in the building dim because the mainframe is kicking off the nightly COBOL batch job. "Powerful" is running a database that has an uptime measured in presidential administrations. Your "powerful approach" is just a fancy script to read the same kind of diagnostic log we've been parsing with grep and awk since before your lead developer was born. We were doing this with DB2 on MVS while you were still trying to figure out how to load a program from a cassette tape.
This whole song and dance about replication just proves you've forgotten the basics. You’re so busy building these fragile, distributed Rube Goldberg machines that you forgot how to build something that just doesn't fall over. You’ve got more layers of abstraction than a Russian nesting doll and every single one is a potential point of failure. We had the hardware, the OS, and the database. If something broke, you knew who to yell at. Who do you yell at when your Kubernetes pod fails to get a lock on a distributed file system in another availability zone? You just write a sad blog post about it, apparently.
The very concept of "stalled replication" is a monument to your own complexity. You’ve built a system so delicate that a network hiccup can send it into a coma. We used to replicate data between mainframes using dedicated SNA links that had the reliability of a granite slab. It was slow, it was expensive, and the manual was a three-volume binder that could stop a bullet. But it worked. Your solution?
...an extremely powerful approach to resolving replication problems using the Log […] Oh, the Log! What a revolutionary concept! You mean the system journal? The audit trail? The thing we’ve been using for roll-forward recovery since the days of punch cards? Groundbreaking.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. It’s been a real hoot watching you all reinvent concepts we perfected decades ago, only this time with more steps and less reliability.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go find my LTO-4 cleaning tape. It's probably more robust than your entire stack. I will not be subscribing.