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Do you even need a database?

dbpro.app

11–20 of 311 posts

Re: Do you even need a database?

#11
I agree. Databases are useless. You don't even need to load it into the memory. Reading it from the disk when there is a need to read something must be ok. I don't believe the case that there are billions of records so the database must be something optimized for handling it. That amount of records most likely is something like access logs etc, I think they should not be stored at all, for such case.

Even it's postgres, it is still a file on disk. If there is need something like like partitioning the data, it is much more easier to write the code that partitions the data.

If there is a need to adding something with textinputs, checkboxes etc, database with their admin tools may be a good thing. If the data is something that imported exported etc, database may be a good thing too. But still I don't believe such cases, in my ten something years of software development career, something like that never happened.

Re: Do you even need a database?

#14
post #8

At some point, don't you just end up making a low-quality, poorly-tested reinvention of SQLite by doing this and adding features?

Sometimes yes, I've seen it. It even tends to happen on NoSQL databases as well. Three times I've seen apps start on top of Dynamo DB, and then end up re-implementing relational databases at the application level anyway. Starting with postgres would have been the right answer for all three of those. Initial dev went faster, but tech debt and complexity quickly started soaking up all those gains and left a hard-to-maintain mess.

Re: Do you even need a database?

#15
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony isn’t lost on us, trust me. We spent a while debating whether to even publish this one. But yeah, the page cache point is real and massively underappreciated. Modern infrastructure discourse skips past it almost entirely. A warm NVMe-backed file with the OS doing the caching is genuinely fast enough for most early-stage products.

props for actually publishing it tbh. transparent engineering takes are so rare now, usually its just seo fluff. weve basically been brainwashed to think we need kubernetes and 3 different databases just to serve a few thousand users. gotta burn those startup cloud credits somehow i guess. mad respect for the honesty though, actually makes me want to check out db pro when i finally outgrow my flat files.

I'm feel like I could write another post: Do you even need serverless/Cloud because we've also been brainwashed into thinking we need to spend hundreds/thousands a month on AWS when a tiny VPS will do.

Similar sentiment.

Re: Do you even need a database?

#16
Not to nitpick, but it would be interesting to see profiling info of the benchmarks

Different languages and stdlib methods can often spend time doing unexpected things that makes what looks like apples-to-apples comparisons not quite equivalent

Re: Do you even need a database?

#18

I agree. Databases are useless. You don't even need to load it into the memory. Reading it from the disk when there is a need to read something must be ok. I don't believe the case that there are billions of records so the database must be something optimized for handling it. That amount of records most likely is something like access logs etc, I think they should not be stored at all, for such case. Even it's postgr…

Not sure if sarcastic…

Re: Do you even need a database?

#19
I tried doing this with csv files (and for an online solution, Google Sheets)

I ended up just buying a VPS, putting openclaw on it, and letting it Postgres my app.

I feel like this article is outdated since the invention of OpenClaw/Claude Opus level AI Agents. The difficulty is no longer programming.

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