🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Oh, fantastic. A recording. Just what I wanted to do with the five minutes of peace I have between my last on-call alert and the inevitable PagerDuty screech that will summon me back to the digital salt mines. "No More Workarounds," you say? That’s adorable. It’s like you’ve never met a product manager with a "game-changing" new feature request that happens to be architecturally incompatible with everything we’ve built.

Since you were so graciously asking for more questions, here are a few from the trenches that somehow never seem to make it past the webinar moderator.

• Let’s start with the word “transparent.” Is that like the “transparent” 20% performance hit on I/O operations that we’re not supposed to notice until our p99 latency SLOs are a sea of red? Or is it more like the “transparent” debugging process, where the root cause is now buried under three new layers of abstraction, making my stack traces look like a novel by James Joyce? I’m just trying to manage my expectations for the predictable performance pitfalls that are always glossed over in the demo.

• You mention this like it's a simple toggle, but my PTSD from the Great NoSQL Migration of '23 is telling me otherwise. I still have nightmares about the “simple, one-off migration script” that was supposed to take two hours and resulted in a 72-hour outage. Forgive me for being skeptical, but what you call a solution, I call another weekend of painless promises preceding predictable pandemonium. I can already hear my VP of Engineering saying:

  "Just run it on a staging environment first. What could possibly go wrong?"

• I noticed a distinct lack of slides on the absolute carnival of horrors that is key management. Where are these encryption keys living? Who has access? What’s the rotation policy? What happens when our cloud provider’s KMS has a “minor service disruption” at 3 AM on a Saturday, effectively locking us out of our own database? Because this “simple” solution sounds like it’s introducing a brand new, single point of failure that will cause a cascading catastrophe of cryptographic complexity.

• And because it’s open source, I assume “support” means a frantic late-night trawl through half-abandoned forums, looking for a GitHub issue from 2021 that describes my exact problem, only for the final comment to be “nvm fixed it” with no further explanation. The delightful dive into dependency drama when this TDE extension conflicts with our backup tooling or that other obscure Postgres extension we need is just the cherry on top.

• But my favorite part, the real chef’s kiss, is the title: “No More Workarounds.” You see, this new feature isn’t the end of workarounds. It’s the birth of them. It’s the foundational problem that will inspire a whole new generation of clever hacks, emergency patches, and frantic hotfixes, all of which I will be tasked with implementing. This isn’t a solution; it’s just the next layer of technical debt we’re taking on before the next “game-changing” database paradigm comes along in 18 months, requiring another "simple" migration.

Anyway, great webinar. I will be cheerfully unsubscribing and never reading this blog again.