I still remember a quote from a computer magazine I read when I was 12. In an article comparing the programming languages of the time, a C developer described the Pascal programming language as “having a mother hen hovering over you, watching your every move, making sure you don’t screw up.” I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but he was most likely referring to the strong type checking in Pascal, which could lead to compiler and runtime errors…

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First a little context: At Faradai we had been using PostgreSQL on the ext4 file system for a number of years until it recently became evident that the constantly growing database size (over 5 TB at the time) would start to cause issues in general performance, cloud costs, and the ability to have reliable backups. We reviewed a number of alternative file systems, and chose ZFS mainly for its following three features…

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Vendor lock-in: An unfortunate condition that forces a person or company to continue using a disliked product or service just because they invested in it so much. Vendor lock-in used to affect mostly large companies using mission critical legacy applications, but as more and more companies move to the cloud, cloud providers started to rediscover the joys of vendor lock-in by offering “value-added” services that simplify the lives of software developers who have better things in life than managing servers and databases…

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