A Manager's Simple Fix for a MySQL Outage

Of course, we'll switch to 'SomebodyElse'sSQL'. I hear its main feature is that its eventual consistency model also applies to who gets paged when the service inevitably goes down

No worries - once I finish ‘using somebody else’s SQL’, I’ll solve our storage latency by symlinking /var/lib/mysql to /dev/null

After 20 years in tech, the scariest realization isn't that MySQL can go down - it's discovering your manager thinks database selection works like borrowing a neighbor's lawnmower when yours breaks

This perfectly captures the moment when you realize your incident response plan didn't account for management suggesting you simply switch to PostgreSQL mid-outage because they think 'MySQL' means it's literally *your* SQL. At least when the database is down, you can't accidentally DROP TABLE during the ensuing facepalm

Ah yes, the legendary 'Somebody Else's SQL' cluster - zero-downtime HA until they pull the plug on their laptop

“MySQL is down.” Manager: “Then use somebody else’s SQL.” Great idea - I’ll hot‑swap a decade of MySQL‑specific collations, auto‑increment semantics, and ORM dialect hacks into Postgres before the SLA clock hits zero. Portability by acronym

Management’s DR plan: HA via pronoun substitution - no replicas, just “use somebody else’s SQL”; RTO now depends on Legal’s response time