Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, settle down, kids. The new blog post just dropped, and it’s a real humdinger. "Why We Maintain Our Own Private ClickHouse Fork." Bless your hearts. I haven't seen this much earnest self-importance since a junior sysadmin tried to explain "the cloud" to me by drawing on a napkin. It's just a mainframe with a better marketing department, son. Let's pour a cup of lukewarm coffee and break this down.
So, you took a perfectly good open-source project and decided your problems are so unprecedentedly unique that only you can solve them. Back in my day, if we had a problem with the IMS database, we didn't "fork" it. We submitted a change request on a three-part carbon form, waited six months, and prayed the folks in Poughkeepsie would grace us with a patch on a reel-to-reel tape. You kids just click a button and suddenly you're database pioneers. It's adorable.
I love the part where you explain you're adding all these groundbreaking features. You mention optimizing for your specific hardware and workloads. Cute. We used to call that "tuning." In 1985, we were tuning DB2 on a System/370 by manually re-ordering the link-pack area and adjusting buffer pool sizes with arcane JCL commands that looked like ancient runes. You're not inventing fire, you've just discovered how to rub two sticks together with a Python script and you think you're Prometheus.
Let me tell you about "technical debt." You've just created a creature that you alone must feed and care for. Every time the main ClickHouse project releases a critical security patch, one of your bright-eyed engineers gets to spend a week trying to back-port it, resolving merge conflicts that make a COBOL spaghetti GOTO statement look like a model of clarity. I once spent a holiday weekend restoring a payroll database from tape because some genius wrote a "custom, optimized" indexer that corrupted a VSAM file. Your fork is that indexer, just with more YAML.
The justification is always my favorite part.
We've long contributed to the open source ClickHouse community, and we didn't make this decision lightly. I'm sure it was a gut-wrenching decision made over catered lunches. This line is the modern equivalent of "this will hurt me more than it hurts you" before you unplug a production server. You're not doing this for the community; you're doing it because you think you're smarter than the community. We had guys like that in the '80s. They wrote their own sorting algorithms in Assembler instead of using the system standard. Their code was fast, brilliant, and completely unmaintainable by anyone but them. They usually quit a year later to go "find themselves."
You're now on an island. A beautiful, custom-built, high-performance island that is slowly drifting away from the mainland. In two years, you'll be so far behind the mainline branch that upgrading is impossible. Then you'll write the follow-up post, "Announcing Our New, Revolutionary, In-House Database: 'ClickForkDB!'" We've seen this cycle more times than I've had to re-spool a tape drive.
But hey, don't let an old relic like me stop you. It's good to see young people showing initiative. Builds character. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go check on a batch job that's been running since Tuesday.