"This distinction played a crucial role in our upgrade planning and execution strategy."
"Navigating Challenges in the MySQL Upgrade Journey"
"Finally, minimizing manual intervention during the upgrade process was crucial."
Whilst it may smell of ChatGPT/Claude, I think the answer is actually simpler.
Look at the authors of the blog, search LinkedIn. They are all based in India, mostly Bangalore.
It is therefore more likely to be Indian English.
To be absolutely clear, for absolute avoidance of doubt:
This is NOT intended a racist comment. Indians clearly speak English fluently. But the style and flow of English is different. Just like it is for US English, Australian English or any other English. I am not remotely saying one English is better than another !
If, like me, you have spent many hours on the phone to Bangalore call-centres, you will recognise many of the stylistic patterns present in the blog text.
Hate to generalize, but this has less to do with "Indian style" but rather adding a lot of fluff to make a problem appear more complex than it is, OR maybe someone set a template that you must write such and such sections, despite there not being relevant content. [ Half the sections from this article could be cut without losing anything ]
In this case, the _former_ really shouldn't have been the case. I for one would love to read a whole lot more about rollback planning, traffic shifting, which query patterns saw most improvements, hardware cost optimizations, if any, etc.
In a like vein when Australians say "goodeye" they usually aren't talking about your vision.
I had to really think hard why it is incorrect / not common elsewhere. Had to see comments to learn -- someone explained that a native English speaker would instead say "this morning" and not "today morning".
As a Indian ESL speaker -- "today morning" sounded (and still sounds) perfectly fine to me -- since my brain grew up with indian languages where this literal phrase (equivalent of "TODAY morning") is not only very common, but also the normal/correct way to convey the idea, and if we instead try to say "THIS morning" it would feel pretty contrived.
Frankly, ChatGPT could have written this better with a simple “improve the style of this text” directive.
Example from the start:
> MySQL v8.0 offered a compelling proposition with its promise of substantial performance enhancements.
That could have just been “MySQL v8.0 promised substantial performance improvements.”
Or perhaps it was meant to specify that they, themselves, might have been presumed to be an outlier who would think it was a good idea, but who has in fact come to think that is a bad idea.
Examples of this kind of counter-presumptive use of the word "even":
1: On animals and the weather: "It was so cold that even polar bears were suffering from frostbite and frozen digits."
2: On politics, where one's general stance is well-known and who who might be rationally presumed to be a supporter of a particular thing: "Even I think that this issue is a total non-starter."
Even if they may have meant something else, that doesn't mean that they didn't intend for the words to be taken non-literally.
Largely as @brk above you already mentioned, tendency to use formal and obscure words alongside a specific tone. I'll also re-iterate what @brk said, hard to fully describe, more of a "you know it when you see it".
If I had to pick some specific examples from the blog post, the following phrase is a good example:
We systematically advanced through each tier, commencing from tier 5 and descending to tier 0.
There are 101 ways you could write that in US English, but I reckon 99% of the US population would be unlikely to pick the above unless they were writing an academic paper or something.
This one is also quite Indian English in many respects:
Our automated alerts and monitoring system actively oversees the process to ensure a seamless transition and promptly alerts of any issues that may arise.
Similarly, we have stylistic elements such as the over-breaking of paragraphs to the extent it becomes a series of statements. For example:
Upgrading to MySQL 8.0 brought not only new features, but also some unexpected tweaks in query execution plans for certain clusters. This resulted in increased latencies and resource consumption, potentially impacting user experience. This happened for the cluster which powers all the dashboards running at Uber. To address this issue, we collaborated with Percona, identified a patch fix, and successfully implemented it for the affected clusters. The resolution ensured the restoration of optimized query performance and resource efficiency in alignment with the upgraded MySQL version.
A relatively short paragraph, but five phrases. Your average US English writer would likely word it differently resulting in it being trimmed down to two or three phrases.
As I said in my original post though, none of it is bad English, its just a different style.
Another common phrase in Indian English is "do the needful," which is a delightful formulation. Grammarly has a plausible description of how it arose. [0]