[Nextgrid]

> When I deploy something that unintentionally causes a large monetary bill to my employer, then yes I do believe that indicates a gap in knowledge so I don't in anyway believe I'm being uncharitable.

It depends, if you've been given a loaded footgun it's not entirely your fault when it inevitably goes off.

Let's go back to your "compiler errors" scenario, and let's say someone decided that the company should be using a cloud-based compiler that happens to charge per error. I wouldn't blame developers for falling into a trap that challenges all known assumptions.

The problem is that there is a DB that charges insane amounts of money per row processed with no upper limit and that someone actually thought it was a good idea to use it.

[unclebucknasty]

>The problem is that there is a DB that charges insane amounts of money per row processed with no upper limit and that someone actually thought it was a good idea to use it.

That's it in a nutshell. Usually you have an upper bound on compute, memory, disk space or some other resource for a specific price. When you hit those limits, you find performance issues and at that point you can choose to try optimizing your code or database, then decide whether you need to upgrade resources at cost.

I really don't understand this model that charges for rows read or, worse, "inspected". What's the upside of that model versus more typical pricing schemes, and how is it manageable/predictable from a budget perspective? With or without the indexing problem here, you'd really have to know your user behavior, then translate that to DB read counts by your app. And, while devs should all be optimizing code as much as reasonable, something as specific as minimizing DB reads seems an odd constraint to place on software.

I'm guessing there must be some use case I'm missing; else I don't know why this pricing scheme is even a thing.

[tristor]

I am somewhat shocked to find that an RDBMS is considered a “loaded footgun” in 2021. Perhaps grandparent isn’t the most charitable in their interpretation, but I am in full agreement. It continues to astound me how little about the basics of databases most developers know, and how strongly resistant they are to trying to learn.

[Nextgrid]

An RDBMS that scales infinitely while charging you per-row goes against the usual assumptions learned in the past decades, so I'd say yes that's a loaded footgun.

[zerd]

Have a friend who had a BigQuery query that ended up costing $3k each time. It ran for only a minute, because BigQuery chews through data really fast. But you don't realize that when you push the run query button. And there's no spend guard rails. They switched to pay for given amount of parallelism after that.

[Grimm1]

First its not my "compiler errors" scenario it's the person who initially replied to me. Sure whatever, I don't think I ever insinuated I thought that was a good idea, it runs in parallel with the issue I have.