Do you even need a database? • Hacker News Board

Re: Do you even need a database?

#111

Post by linuxhansl » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

Hmm... Sure, if you do not need a database then do not use a database.

Don't use a sports-car to haul furniture or a garbage truck as an ambulance. For the use case and scale mentioned in the article it's obvious not to use a database.

Am I missing something? I guess many people are the using the tools they are familiar with and rarely question whether they are really applicable. Is that the message?

I think a more interesting question is whether you will need a single source of truth. If you don't you can scale on many small data sets without a database.

I will say this before I shut up with my rant: If you start with a design that scales you will have an easier to scale when it is time without re-engineering your stack. Whether you think you will need to scale depends on your projected growth and the nature of your problem (do you need a single source of truth, etc.)

Edits: Spelling

Re: Do you even need a database?

#112

Post by cratermoon » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

I worked one place that shoehorned SQL Server into a system to hold a small amount of static data that could easily have been a config file or even (eek) hard-coded.

Re: Do you even need a database?

#113

Post by tracker1 » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 4:55 PM UTC

upmostly wrote: post #4

vovanidze wrote: post #3

people wildly underestimate the os page cache and modern nvme drives tbh. disk io today is basically ram speeds from 10 years ago. seeing startups spin up managed postgres + redis clusters + prisma on day 1 just to collect waitlist emails is peak feature vomit. a jsonl file and a single go binary will literally outlive most startup runways. also, the irony of a database gui company writing a post about how you dont a…

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.

Definitely appreciate the post and the discussion that has come from it... While I'm still included to just reach for SQLite as a near starting point, it's often worth considering depending on your needs.

In practice, I almost always separate the auth chain from the service chain(s) in that if auth gets kicked over under a DDoS, at least already authenticated users stand a chance of still being able to use the apps. I've also designed auth system essentially abstracted to key/value storage with adapters for differing databases (including SQLite) for deployments...

Would be interested to see how LevelDB might perform for your testing case, in that it seems to be a decent option for how your example is using data.

Re: Do you even need a database?

#114

Post by tracker1 » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

chuckadams wrote: post #7

I need a filesystem that does some database things. We got teased with that with WinFS and Beos's BFS, but it seems the football always gets yanked away, and the mainstream of filesystems always reverts back to the APIs established in the 1980s.

FWIW, you can do some things like this on top of S3 Metadata.

Re: Do you even need a database?

#115

Post by pseudosavant » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

koliber wrote: post #59

I love this article as it shows how fast computers really are. There is one conclusion that I do not agree with. Near the end, the author lists cases where you will outgrow flat files. He then says that "None of these constraints apply to a lot of applications." One of the constraints is "Multiple processes need to write at the same time." It turns out many early stage products need crons and message queues that exec…

SQLite has become my new go-to when starting any project that needs a DB. The performance is very fast, and if anything is ever successful enough to outgrow SQLite, it wouldn't be that hard to switch it out for Postgres. Not having to maintain/backup/manage a separate database server is cheaper and easier.

Re: Do you even need a database?

#116

Post by adrian_b » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

shafoshaf wrote: post #47

Relational Databases Aren’t Dinosaurs, They’re Sharks. https://www.simplethread.com/relational-databases-arent-dino... The very small bonus you get on small apps is hardly worth the time you spend redeveloping the wheel.

Sharks vs. dinosaurs seems indeed an appropriate metaphor.

During Cretaceous, when dinosaurs were at their peak, sharks had already become very similar to the sharks of today, e.g. there were big sharks that differed very little from the white sharks and tiger sharks of today.

Then the dinosaurs have disappeared, together with the pterosaurs and the mosasaurs, and they have been replaced by other animals, but the sharks have continued to live until today with little changes, because they had already reached an optimized design that was hard to improve.

Besides the sharks, during Cretaceous there already existed along the dinosaurs other 2 groups of big predators that have changed little since then, crocodiles and big constrictor snakes similar to the pythons of today.

Therefore all 3 (sharks, crocodiles and big constrictor snakes) are examples of locally optimum designs that have been reached more than 70 million years ago, without needing after that any major upgrades.

Re: Do you even need a database?

#117

Post by ghc » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #17

ghc wrote: post #6

I'm so old I remember working on databases that were designed to use RAW, not files. I'm betting some databases still do, but probably only for mainframe systems nowadays.

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B16276_01/doc/win.102/b14305/arch...

> Oracle® Database Platform Guide 10g Release 2 (10.2) for Microsoft Windows Itanium (64-Bit)

Well, I guess that at least confirms Oracle on Itanium (!?) still supported RAW 5 years ago.

I'm guessing everyone's on ASM by now though, if they're still upgrading. I ran into a company not long ago with a huge oracle cluster that still employed physical database admins and logical database admins as separate roles...I would bet they're still paying millions for an out of date version of Oracle and using RAW.

Re: Do you even need a database?

#118

Post by tracker1 » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

stackskipton wrote: post #49

SRE here. My "Huh, neat" side of my brain is very interested. The SRE side of my brain is screaming "GOD NO, PLEASE NO" Overhead in any project is understanding it and onboarding new people to it. Keeping on "mainline" path is key to lower friction here. All 3 languages have well supported ORM that supports SQLite.

I'm mostly with you here... it's amazing how many devs don't have a certain amount of baseline knowledge to understand file-io, let alone thin abstractions for custom data and indexing like tfa. Then again, most devs also don't understand the impacts of database normalization under load either.

Re: Do you even need a database?

#119

Post by hackingonempty » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

z3ugma wrote: 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?

Probably more like a low-quality, poorly-tested reinvention of BerkeleyDB.

Re: Do you even need a database?

#120

Post by chuckadams » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #114

chuckadams wrote: post #7

I need a filesystem that does some database things. We got teased with that with WinFS and Beos's BFS, but it seems the football always gets yanked away, and the mainstream of filesystems always reverts back to the APIs established in the 1980s.

FWIW, you can do some things like this on top of S3 Metadata.

Transactions are one thing I want the most, and that's not going to happen on S3. Sure, I can reinvent them by hand, but the point is I want that baked in.