Cars have become unpredictable, unreliable, and overly complicated. Touchscreens for everything, mystery software updates, and good luck figuring out why the check engine light is on. Meanwhile, everyone in tech (except DBAs, of course) keeps saying databases are complex. But here’s my hot take: databases are simple. Cars are complex. At least with a database, when something breaks, there's a log, an error code, and usually a fix that doesn’t involve rebooting the entire vehicle.

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Here is my car's dashboard as of this morning.

The colorful display of flashing lights is no doubt a reason for concern for everyone planning to be at the office on-time, provided he is not one of the lucky ones working from home.

The check engine light means, well, something is wrong with the engine. The skidding car light means there is something wrong with the traction control (sounds scary).

And there's the flashing cruise control (very annoying) which obviously means there is something wrong with the cruise control system. Obviously my car is totally broken.

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So I wasted the morning on this and paid a visit to my favorite car repair guy. 

He wasn't exited from the dashboard lights as I was.

He connected the diagnostics computer and as it turns out there is a minor issue with one of the sensors.

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"You can go" He said.

‍"The car is fine!"

"So why the flashing lights?" I asked.

He explained that "The specific combination of check engine + traction control + cruise control = bad sensor"

One would expect that after over a century of making cars, there will be a simple notification such as "bad sensor x" instead of using a combination of unrelated messages.

I wish cars would be more like databases. 

In every database that I know you will, in most cases, get a simple precise error message in the database log saying something like "ORA-123456 - bad sensor."

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