The problem is that in the old days, not knowing about indexes left you with an underperforming system or downtime. But in The Cloud™ it leaves you with an unreasonably huge bill and that somehow as an industry we're accepting this as normal.
They'll have to clean up the mess which causes real business consequences that, and I've personally seen this, will directly impact bottom line and have no quick or easy solution to wiggle out of.
Maybe it's acceptable for products like this because the balance between good engineering and company health probably aren't as cut and clear but stuff like this always makes me sad because it's such low hanging fruit, it doesn't require any real effort, just basic curiosity around your job.
I have a problem with whoever looked at <insert your favorite on-prem RDBMS here> and said "nah, let's go with a cloud-based solution that charges per-query and gives us an essentially infinite financial liability".
Backing up an on-prem DB doesn't require specialist DBA knowledge. Basic UNIX skills are enough. Not to mention, since you're not in the cloud, bandwidth or efficiency is not a concern - feel free to rsync your entire DB off to a backup server every 5 minutes.
> to hire a rock solid DBA? And how much does that DBA cost?
They didn't have a DBA here either, and this "cloud" didn't save them. But at least with an on-prem Postgres the worst they'd have is significantly reduced performance*, where as here they had a 5k bill.
*actually the price/performance ratio for bare-metal servers is so good that a 100$/month server would probably take their unindexed query and work totally fine (as a side effect of the entire working dataset being in the kernel's RAM-based IO cache).
For Postgres you either use the pg-dump command and backup the dump or you setup WAL archiving and save base backups and the WAL files as they are created.
This isn't rocket science, but you really should read the manual at least once before doing this. Just copying the files is not the right way to backup a database (unless you really know what you're doing and are ensuring consistency in some other ways).
However, I'd still take recovering a DB that has been backed up by rsync/cp over a DB that's not been backed up at all. If you really can't be bothered to do it the right way, you're still better off doing something than running with no backups at all.
However regurgitating a platitude that everyone, including myself, learned when we tried getting our first business off the ground doesn't add much value here.
Had this been a Database with 10million rows it would have cost them 50k, and this is incredibly basic programming knowledge.
Basic proficiency is a far cry from worrying about best technical talent and not a particularly egregious ask.
No. Nobody finds that "normal", that's just untrue. It's even the _whole_ subject of this blogpost: the bill was not normal.
I don't disagree that some people are overrelying on cloud services, but that didn't become normality, it's still a beginner's mistake
Absolutely, but previously that wouldn’t cost you €5000 extra.