And that's not even accounting for the principals. Think of it this way: if a country's navy has only a single boat, does it really need both an admiral and a captain?

Grades 9-12 feed into a regional high school, which also has its own school district containing just that school. It also has its own superintendent and principal.

I don't think "redundant" is a strong word for this situation.

This is mainly caused by having a ridiculous number of tiny towns and tiny school districts, each with redundant services and employees.

In a six-minute time period, you posted 10 different comments here, totaling nearly 800 words. I don't believe you are being truthful.

How does this company make money? Is it all just a ZIRP fever dream?

Did you find it worked reasonably well on any portion of the codebase you could throw at it? For example, if I recall correctly, all of MajorMUD's data file interactions used the embedded Btrieve library which was popular at the time. For that type of specialized low-level library, I'm curious how much effort it would take to get readable code.

No, it was 1 to 6 bytes until RFC 3629 (Nov 2003). AFAIK development of MySQL 4.1 began prior to that, despite the release not happening until afterwards.

Again, they absolutely should have addressed it sooner. But people make mistakes, especially as we're talking about a venture-funded startup in the years right after the dot-com crash.

> It literally does not take any more storage because it is a variable width encoding.

I already addressed that in my previous comment: in old versions of MySQL, a number of critical code paths required allocating worst-case buffer sizes, or accounting for worst-case value lengths in indexes, etc. So if a charset allows 6 bytes per character, that means multiplying max length by 6, in order to handle the pathological case.

Season 12 is particularly good though. In my opinion, the first and last episodes of that season are among the funniest they've ever done!

After that, they each wrote an additional Red Dwarf novel individually / separately. Personally I've never come across those last two novels, although I always check for them whenever visiting a used book store. Maybe they were only released in the UK. They're available on Amazon in the US, but I haven't quite given up hope on stumbling across them naturally yet...

My friends and I have found that Patriot phrases make excellent team names in pub trivia, even if no other teams get the references. (Also "double great", "disgraced veterinarians", "pin-flam-fastened pan traps", more I'm forgetting... clearly I need to rewatch the show yet again!)

> I’m not surprised it didn’t get more traction with the general public

I suspect the show would have had a larger audience if it had a better title. That seems to be an instant negative whenever I try recommending it to someone. Hopefully Steven Conrad's new hbo show will raise his profile enough to let more people rediscover Patriot. It's an absolute gem.

Part of my confusion was that this blog post makes no mention whatsoever of any of those things!

It gave me the (incorrect) impression that this observability functionality was the purpose of the product. And it is worded in a way which makes no mention of prior art in built-in DBMS observability.

Looking at the other threads here, I don't think I'm the only one who was confused about that. A couple intro paragraphs to the product might help a lot.

It's great to have that observability functionality, but I don't really understand the purpose of writing a new DBMS from scratch to add this though. Why not get something merged into Postgres core?

[1] https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/performance-schema.h...

[2] https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/sys-schema.html

True, but that's finally solved now.

> I also think that some changes in the database layout could lead to strange things on the replicas.

I've been using MySQL for 23 years and have no idea what you're referring to here, sorry. But it's not like other DBs have quirk-free replication either. Postgres logical replication doesn't handle DDL at all, for example.

What "strange stuff around replication" are you referring to?

There wasn't a clear winner in utf-8 at the time, especially given its 6-byte-max representation back then. Memory and storage were a lot more limited.

And yes while 6 bytes was the maximum, a bunch of critical paths (e.g. sorting logic) in old MySQL required allocating a worst-case buffer size, so this would have been prohibitively expensive.

Also, it's important to consider that replication and backups serve different purposes. Backups alone are insufficient for high availability, change data capture, point-in-time recovery / undoing a bad change, etc.