Absurdity
Engineer Asks If Postgres Can Run Doom, Postgres Can Run Doom, Engineer Has A Meeting On Monday
By Jeff Garstein, . BSN Network. Satire.
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- On Friday at approximately 2:14 p.m., Marcus Delaney, a senior backend engineer at a logistics software company called FreightCore Solutions, typed the question "but can it run Doom" into a Slack channel devoted to PostgreSQL optimization tips.
By 6:47 p.m., the answer was yes.
By Monday morning, the answer had a Jira ticket, an owner, and a line in the Q3 infrastructure roadmap.
Delaney had ported the entirety of the 1993 id Software first-person shooter to execute inside a live Postgres instance using PL/pgSQL, the database's own procedural language, rendering each frame as a text grid in the query output window at approximately eight frames per second. The game is technically playable. The latency is, in his own words, "somewhere between bad and legally actionable."
FreightCore's CTO, Brian Moulton, confirmed in a company-wide email Tuesday that the project, now formally titled "DoomDB," had been assigned to Delaney as a twenty-percent-time initiative, which at FreightCore means every Friday, which is also the only day the office has decent air conditioning.
"This demonstrates exactly the kind of creative, outside-the-box infrastructure thinking that defines our engineering culture," Moulton wrote, in an email that also reminded staff to complete their Q3 self-assessments by Thursday.
Delaney has not responded to the Jira ticket. The ticket has been open for six days. It has two subtasks and a dependency on a vendor review that has not been scheduled.
The PostgreSQL community, for its part, reacted the way it always reacts when someone does something inadvisable with the database: with immediate admiration, seventeen forks on GitHub, and at least one person on the mailing list asking whether it had been tested against version 9.6.
It had not been tested against version 9.6.
When asked whether running a first-person shooter inside a production database engine was, in any meaningful technical sense, a good idea, Delaney said: "I mean, I asked if it could. I didn't ask if it should. Those are different questions and I only had time for one of them on a Friday."
Oracle's enterprise database division did not return a request for comment, but a spokesperson for a competing database vendor said their product could also run Doom, could run it at a higher frame rate, and that licensing started at $340,000 annually per core, which for Doom's purposes would be two cores minimum.
Delaney's manager, for his part, has already forwarded the GitHub repository to a client in the manufacturing sector with the note: "thought this might be relevant to your use case."
The client replied: "Can it run Quake?"
Delaney has been asked to find out.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.theregister.com/databases/2026/10/03/clever-database-but-can-it-run-doom/5300506