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Databases in 2025: A Year in Review

cs.cmu.edu

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Re: Databases in 2025: A Year in Review

#91

Post by greenavocado »

odie5533 wrote: post #13
TekMol wrote: post #9

From my perspective on databases, two trends continued in 2025: 1: Moving everything to SQLite 2: Using mostly JSON fields Both started already a few years back and accelerated in 2025. SQLite is just so nice and easy to deal with, with its no-daemon, one-file-per-db and one-type-per value approach. And the JSON arrow functions make it a pleasure to work with flexible JSON data.

For as much talk as I see about SQLite, are people actually using it or does it just have good marketers?

If you use desktops, laptops, or mobile phones, there is a very good chance you have at least ten SQLite databases in your possession right now.

Re: Databases in 2025: A Year in Review

#92

Post by sanderjd »

theanonymousone wrote: post #90
sanderjd wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that this is still too slow for quick inserts, because duckdb (like all columnar stores) is designed for batches.

The way I understood it, you can do your inserts with SQLite "proper", and simultaneously use DuckDB for analytics (aka read-only).

Aha! That makes so much sense. Thank you for this.

Edit: Ah, right, the downside is that this is not going to have good olap query performance when interacting directly with the sqlite tables. So still necessary to copy out to duckdb tables (probably in batches) if this matters. Still seems very useful to me though.

Re: Databases in 2025: A Year in Review

#94

Post by apavlo »

beders wrote: post #21

While the author mentions that he just doesn't have the time to look at all the databases, none of the reviews of the last few years mention immutable and/or bi-temporal databases. Which looks more like a blind spot to me honestly. This category of databases is just fantastic for industries like fintech. Two candidates are sticking out. https://xtdb.com/blog/launching-xtdb-v2 (2025) https://blog.datomic.com/2023/04/d…

> none of the reviews of the last few years mention immutable and/or bi-temporal databases.

We hosted XTDB to give a tech talk five weeks ago:

https://db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futuredata-reconstructing-histo...

> Which looks more like a blind spot to me honestly.

What do you want me to say about them? Just that they exist?

Re: Databases in 2025: A Year in Review

#96

Post by CuriouslyC »

TekMol wrote: post #9

From my perspective on databases, two trends continued in 2025: 1: Moving everything to SQLite 2: Using mostly JSON fields Both started already a few years back and accelerated in 2025. SQLite is just so nice and easy to deal with, with its no-daemon, one-file-per-db and one-type-per value approach. And the JSON arrow functions make it a pleasure to work with flexible JSON data.

I think the right pattern here is edge sharding of user data. Cloudflare makes this pretty easy with D1/Hyperdrive.

Re: Databases in 2025: A Year in Review

#98

Post by senderista »

divan wrote: post #89

> Acquisitions ... Gel → Vercel is a bit misleading. Gel (formerly EdgeDB) is sunsetting it's development. (extremely talented) Team joins Vercel to work on other stuff. That was a hard hit for me in December. I loved working with EdgeQL so much.

It is a beautifully designed language and would make a great starting point for future DB projects.

Re: Databases in 2025: A Year in Review

#99

Post by cryptica »

It's so weird how everyone nowadays is using Postgres. It's not like end users can see your database.

It's disturbing how everyone is gravitating towards the same tools. This started happening since React and kept getting worse. Software development sucks nowadays.

All technical decisions about which tools to use are made by people who don't have to use the tools. There is no nuance anymore. There's a blanket solution for every problem and there isn't much to choose from. Meanwhile, software is less reliable than it's ever been.

It's like a bad dream. Everything is bad and getting worse.

Re: Databases in 2025: A Year in Review

#100

Post by chasd00 »

WJW wrote: post #26
andrewinardeer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my ignorance, yet wasn't the prevailing thought a few years ago that you would never use SQLite in production? Has that school of thought changed?

SQlite as a database for web services had a little bit of a boom due to: 1. People gaining newfound appreciation of having the database on the same machine as the web server itself. The latency gains can be substantial and obviously there are some small cost savings too as you don't need a separate database server anymore. This does obviously limit you to a single web server, but single machines can have tons of core…

I’m a fan of SQLite but just want to point out there’s no reason you can’t have Postgres or some other rdbms on the same machine as the webserver too. It’s just another program running in the background bound to a port similar to the web server itself.
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