Charity Majors on the Accidental DBA phenomenon:
(OH RIGHT, WE WROTE A BOOK ABOUT THIS!!!)
My friend Laine and I are writing a book for people on the data side, called “Database Reliability Engineering“, which is aimed at generalist engineers who want to learn how to deal with data responsibly and effectively.
(Actually that’s a good point, I am supposed to be pitching this book! — which is really mostly Laine with a smidgen of me but it’s going to be super awesome. Consider this your sales pitch.)
So first, as an accidental DBA, you should obviously buy this book :). Second: stateful services require a different mindset[*]. It’s cool that you are running your own databases! But reading post mortems like this where the conclusion is “MongoDB sucks” makes me fucking grind my teeth.
The theme of the story is a Mongo upgrade gone south, but this is a post about principles. And rainbows.