Your Database Skills Are Not 'Good to Have'
A MySQL war story from 2006: a three-person team builds faceted search for New York Magazine's Fashion Week portal, with exact per-tag counts, before Solr facets or Endeca existed. The author tunes MySQL 4 by timing queries and reading EXPLAIN output. Twenty years later he sees the opposite trend: engineers reach for "planet-scale" databases while barely knowing the relational engine they already run. He recounts an e-commerce incident where a product listing page took over 10 seconds even with no traffic, caused by three mistakes at once: no index, ORM loops firing 200-500 queries per page, and SELECT-ing every column. The argument: a modern RDBMS is innocent until proven guilty, and the burden of proof is on you. Includes a troubleshooting runbook and anti-patterns (exotic databases, unnecessary caching, data landfill). For backend and data engineers.