I wish they had...

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The past few days we drove from the South of Germany to Westphalia and back. In most cases this is more or less some relaxed driving on a long stretch of Autobahn (our navigation system: "follow the road for 480 km"). This time however, we had to deal with strong downpours and related accidents as well as many construction zones. That's when I had to think about DB2 - naturally....

Some minutes on the Autobahn, a heavy downpour from almost black clouds started. Still, some drivers continued without headlights and with Bleifuss. The result was a complete stop of traffic because of an accident. One driver in a sports car had lost control of his Ultimate Driving Machine and slammed it into the divider and, with some rotations, back onto the highway which then was blocked for traffic. After one lane was mostly cleared in heavy rain, we continued for not even 5 minutes until we reached another similar accident scene. Later, we were passed again by some cars without headlight and in (too) high speed.

How does that relate to DB2 other than that DB2 can be a sports car and fun to use? I was thinking about the automatic and autonomic features. They allow you to drive your (database) engine on autopilot. Sure, some cars already switch on headlights automatically, adjust the speed of wipers, and have enough electronic to control the brakes and keep the car stabilized. But they don't seem to have a health monitor or utility throttling. Simple rules to be implemented could be "if too much rain and no sight, slow down" or "lift right foot from accelerator when no sight". Even a display to show alerts about, e.g., no grip because of 10 cm of water on the road is missing. So my hope is that with more heavy rain, people will finally learn and adjust. Which brings me to learning optimizers...

BTW: Just based on the information from the navigation system and the map of the Autobahn system, which route did we take?