[HN Gopher] 7 Databases in 7 Weeks for 2025
___________________________________________________________________
7 Databases in 7 Weeks for 2025
Author : yarapavan
Score : 207 points
Date : 2024-12-05 17:02 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (matt.blwt.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (matt.blwt.io)
| petesergeant wrote:
| Original 7 were: Redis, Neo4J, CouchDB, MongoDB, HBase, Postgres,
| and DynamoDB
| turnsout wrote:
| Another reason to choose Postgres... if you fell asleep and
| woke up 20 years later like Rip Van Winkle, Postgres would
| still probably be a 100% valid choice.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Precisely - DBs are the LAST thing I want to have to deal
| with swapping every 3 years.
| atonse wrote:
| I didn't realize this [1] was a thing. I've been informally
| referring to our Postgres/Elixir stack as "boring, but in the
| best way possible, it just works with no drama whatsoever" for
| years.
|
| 1: https://boringtechnology.club
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://pragprog.com/titles/pwrdata/seven-databases-in-seven... -
| A book by the same name. Instead of giving you a brief blurb on
| each database, the authors attempt to give you more context and
| exercises with them. Last updated in 2018 it covers PostgreSQL,
| HBase, MongoDB, CouchDB, Neo4J, DynamoDB, and Redis. The first
| edition covered Riak instead of DynamDB.
| nindalf wrote:
| The only one in common in both lists is Postgres. Insane
| longevity.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Yeah and only 6 years ago, which is nothing in the span life
| databases historically. It's not like DBs are a new tech.
|
| Making a decision on DB is somewhat foundational for a lot of
| system architecture, in that you expect to be able to use it
| for years. It is not like some UI framework you toss out
| every 18 months.
|
| So the benefits of the new hyped thing may be outweighed by
| the unknowns & risk of flaming out.
|
| This is the kind of hype cycle that gives me pause when a new
| hot thing like DuckDB which actually ticks a TON of boxes for
| me, but has attracted some of the usual suspects in my work
| network that I consider to be contra signals.
| cpursley wrote:
| Yep, obligatory Postgres Is Enough listicle:
|
| https://gist.github.com/cpursley/c8fb81fe8a7e5df038158bdfe0f.
| ..
| cpursley wrote:
| (most of the time, at least)
| alex7o wrote:
| I like to joke and say that it is the Postgres Cinematic
| universe
| worksonmymach wrote:
| SQL Server and Oracle too but not being open source is a big
| minus.
| deadbabe wrote:
| On the first day of Christmas my true love sent to me, a brand
| new Postgres query
| pjmlp wrote:
| For me the pinnacle of boring RDMS are Oracle and SQL Server.
| hobs wrote:
| There's definitely been fixes in the last half decade to make
| SQL Server a little more boring, but there's plenty of defaults
| that were simple foot guns.
|
| Full recovery mode defaults combined with log growth settings,
| query parallelism costs, maintenance and backup solutions being
| offhanded to Ola, etc - many of those things are fixed but
| things like parameter sniffing are still absolutely causing
| pages going off for someone today.
| motorest wrote:
| Their hefty pricetag bumps them solidly into exciting
| territory.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Definitely exciting Fortune 500 projects.
| fipar wrote:
| Don't forget DB/2!
|
| And, from the same vendor, IBM still ships IMS for those who
| find Codd's ideas too exciting.
| neverartful wrote:
| IBM also still sells Informix.
| ako wrote:
| In this age of AI, I'm missing a database with a focus on AI,
| e.g, something like a vector database, or maybe something even
| better...
| nindalf wrote:
| Pgvecto.rs?
| SahAssar wrote:
| pgvector? postgresml?
| mble_ wrote:
| Author here. I deliberately didn't include one because I'm
| waiting for the dust to settle a bit.
|
| There is a lot of activity in the space, from things like
| TurboPuffer (proprietary), Postgres extensions like VectorChord
| and pgvector, to established players like Elastic getting in on
| the action. Not to mention things like Pinecone.
| ako wrote:
| Fair point, but would be interesting to see what
| characteristics make for a best in class ai database, rag,
| vectors? Or do you foresee ai to replace databases? "ChatGPT,
| can you remember this data for me?"
| mble_ wrote:
| Definitely doesn't replace databases, at least LLMs as they
| currently are. We're going to be stuck with relational
| algebra for a long time to come, but the interfaces to
| interact with store might change over time from SQL to more
| natural language.
|
| > what characteristics make for a best in class ai database
|
| As I said before, I think the space is moving too fast on
| what is "best in class" - see all the vector indexing work
| that has happened in the last ~6 months or so. Big,
| centralised vector stores for some applications will have
| very different profiles to vector stores on the edge/on
| device, for example.
|
| As mentioned, I'm a big fan of boring technology, so I'm
| going to happily wait we have a boring "winner".
| rho4 wrote:
| The article mentions the TigerBeetle Style Guide:
| https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/TI...
|
| I agree so much with the paragraphs about "Dependencies" and
| "Tooling".
| archiewood wrote:
| DuckDB is really having a moment
|
| The ecosystem is very active, and they have recently opened up
| "community extensions" to bring your own functions, data types
| and connections. A barrier at the moment is that extensions are
| written in C++, though this limitation should be removed soon.
|
| I've been building a lot on top of DuckDB, two of the projects
| I'm working on are linked in the article:
|
| - Evidence (https://evidence.dev): Build data apps with SQL +
| Markdown
|
| - DuckDB GSheets (https://duckdb-gsheets.com): Read/Write Google
| Sheets via DuckDB
| dilawar wrote:
| Duckdb is really great. DX is awesome.
|
| I cloned the CVE repository and ingested it into duckdb without
| worrying about table structures. Build a fastapi wrapper to
| query CVEs like SQL. A little bit of caching and it was pretty
| fast. Was done in a few hours.
|
| Shame that their Rust crate wasn't as performant as the python
| module.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| I got into DuckDb thanks to HN comments like these in general,
| it really shines for doing "desktop" analysis that goes beyond
| the usual Excel/Numbers shenanigans.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Are the testimonials on your website real or fake? Apple,
| Flexport, BMW, etc are using evidence.dev?
| thehours wrote:
| I'm using DuckDB for the first time for this year's Advent of
| Code and it's been a delightful experience so far. I was
| looking for something simple to set up and had more advanced
| functionality than what SQLite supports.
| spratzt wrote:
| Extraordinary!
|
| I can't think of any of the advent of code questions this
| year where a database would have been of any use.
|
| Do tell us more.
| thehours wrote:
| It's mostly a challenge I set for myself to see how far I
| could get using SQL! I've done the past couple years in
| Python and just wanted to change it up.
|
| So far parsing the inputs has not been nearly as much of a
| hassle as I thought. I really like how DuckDB supports
| directly selecting from files (e.g. `select * from
| 'file.csv'`). I thought I was going to be spending more
| time creating schemas, running `copy`, etc.
|
| Overall pretty nice quality of life experience so far, even
| if it is only to mess around with a few puzzles.
| maximus93 wrote:
| DuckDB really seems to be having its moment--projects like
| Evidence and DuckDB GSheets are super cool examples of its
| potential. And yeah, Postgres's longevity is insane, it just
| keeps adapting.
|
| On the AI front, vector databases like Pinecone and pgvector are
| exciting, but I'd love to see something even more integrated with
| AI workflows. The possibilities are huge. Curious to hear what
| others think!
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| I like Clickhouse more.
|
| Unrelated, not sure if it is just me, but ever since LLMs
| became popular, I've been seeing an enormous amounts of special
| utf8 characters no one used regularly, like this em dash you
| used.
|
| How is this simple to type? If you're on a phone keyboard, you
| have to switch to special characters, and then have to long-
| hold the dash and then slide to em dash.
| arglebarnacle wrote:
| On a full keyboard it's not too bad--just hold alt and tap
| 0151 on the numpad. Honestly I wish it was harder to type for
| stylistic reasons--it would help cure me of my em-dash
| addiction
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| Haha, you haven't used an em dash at all. You even used --
| in some of your comments.
|
| LLMs are everywhere.
| conductr wrote:
| I noticed that certain browsers started auto converting a
| double hyphen to an emdash as I type, no LLM needed, I think
| that's just a timing coincidence
| elcritch wrote:
| On macs you can do `alt` and `-` to get a -. Even on a phone
| a proper emdash can add effect over a regular dash.
| dhosek wrote:
| Mac people call it option, not alt. alt-minus gives - and
| alt-shift-minus gives --. Certainly, it's much easier than
| the windows enter a numeric code thing which seems insane.
| cfiggers wrote:
| Hi, not the person you asked, but I have an answer to the
| question.
|
| I have an AutoHotkey script that auto-replaces "--" with "--"
| (and auto-disables it in contexts where it's likely intended,
| like SQL editors and my terminal).
|
| I also auto-replace "`-" with "-" so I can conveniently do
| number ranges with the (objectively correct) n-dash to
| indicate a range.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| Why duck db vs chdb?
| mble_ wrote:
| I didn't want ClickHouse to take all the glory. /s
|
| The actual reason is that DuckDB's API and integration into
| other places (e.g. Evidence) and its use of extensions (like
| the aforementioned gsheets one) gives it priority for me.
|
| Additionally, its being used in a bunch more places like
| pg_duckdb that make it more "worth it".
| mmsimanga wrote:
| I work in a big none tech corp and I cannot install WSL so I
| can try out Clickhouse.
| mble_ wrote:
| Author here.
|
| Thanks for sharing! My choices are pretty coloured by personal
| experience, and I didn't want to re-tread anything from the book
| (Redis/Valkey, Neo4j etc) other than Postgres - mostly due to
| Postgres changing _a lot_ over the years.
|
| I had considered an OSS Dynamo-like (Cassandra, ScyllaDB, kinda),
| or a Calvin-like (FaunaDB), but went with FoundationDB instead
| because to me, that was much more interesting.
|
| After a decade of running DBaaS at massive scale, I'm also pretty
| biased towards easy-to-run.
| leeoniya wrote:
| was hoping to see https://github.com/GreptimeTeam/greptimedb on
| the list
|
| maybe 2026, or some bonus content for 2025 :)
|
| https://www.greptime.com/blogs/2024-09-09-report-summary
| timbotron wrote:
| I'm curious why you said you don't find MongoDB interesting?
| mble_ wrote:
| I lived through the MongoDB hype cycle.
|
| For document databases, I'm more interested in things like
| PoloDB and SurrealDB.
| biggestlou wrote:
| As a co-author of the book of the same name, I'm disappointed
| that you didn't see fit to provide any kind of attribution
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| FDB is wildly underrated. Best DB atm
| merqurio wrote:
| FondationDB is such an incredible resource, but it's so hard to
| access for the general public. It's no wonder so few people
| know about it. I've always thought that if there were easier
| ways to interact with it, or some dev-friendly layers built on
| top (or public) it would become way more popular. it has shown
| how well it scales with Apple and snowflake, but is not an
| obvious choice for non-internet scale applications.
|
| If you don't know about FDB; there's an amazing video about how
| they test it that really got me into learning more:
|
| https://youtu.be/4fFDFbi3toc?si=9g3hZogBq3Ou25xZ
| mble_ wrote:
| Yeah, this is the bit for me. We have almost no good OSS
| layers for folks to "plug and play".
|
| Its a bit of a vicious circle - because there is low
| exposure, no one is building those layers. Because no one is
| building the layers, there is no exposure.
| jstimps wrote:
| If you're interested in a layer compatible with Elixir's
| Ecto, please take a look at the EctoFoundationDB adapter:
|
| https://github.com/foundationdb-beam/ecto_foundationdb
|
| https://hexdocs.pm/ecto_foundationdb
| jeffinhat wrote:
| They are developing this simulation concept as a platform:
| https://antithesis.com/
| amazingamazing wrote:
| Surprised no one has built a dynamodb compatible api yet.
| Wouldn't be that difficult. Dynamodb actually has similar
| constraints already
| wmfiv wrote:
| Maybe there aren't too many itches left to scratch?
|
| Between Dynamodb, Cassandra, and Scylla seems like that
| problem set is somewhat a solved problem? I know those
| products continue to move forward, but they all work really
| well at this point and solve the fundamental problem to a
| good degree.
| znpy wrote:
| > CockroachDB
|
| didn't it like go closes-source a while ago?
| mble_ wrote:
| Still very much "open-source":
| https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach
|
| But relicensed to the "CockroachDB Software License" as a form
| of BSL to prevent reselling.
| maxmcd wrote:
| I think "source available" at this point:
| https://news.itsfoss.com/cockcroachdb-no-open-source/
| littlekey wrote:
| I'm just gonna say it: unless I had a specific reason to use it,
| I would cross CockroachDB off my list purely based on the name. I
| don't want to be thinking of cockroaches every time I use my
| database. Names do have meaning, and I have to wonder why they
| went with that one.
| greghn wrote:
| > _Names do have meaning, and I have to wonder why they went
| with that one._
|
| "CockroachDB gets its name from cockroaches, as they are known
| for being disaster-resistant.[5]"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CockroachDB
| sdesol wrote:
| For those not familiar with DuckDB, it's an amazing database, but
| it is not a replacement for SQLite, if you are looking for a
| lightweight server side DB. I'm in love with the DuckDB client
| and use it to query SQLite databases, but due the fact that it
| only supports one concurrent write connection, it is not suitable
| as a server side DB.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-12-05 23:00 UTC)