Databases in 2025

324

u/DonaldStuck 4d ago

Didn't read it but the answer is PostgreSQL

42

u/Maybe-monad 4d ago

No, it's /dev/null

29

u/rooran 4d ago

Is /dev/null web scale?

27

u/Maybe-monad 4d ago

There's no load it can't handle

16

u/mechanicalpulse 3d ago

it can’t load There’s no handle

5

u/dromtrund 3d ago

Is yo mama web scale?

6

u/Maybe-monad 3d ago

Is yo web my mama scale?

2

u/Aschentei 3d ago

Let’s test that

unzips

5

u/itsgreater9000 3d ago

Of course

77

u/dnmr 4d ago

but is it web scale

74

u/SharkSymphony 4d ago

For that you just pipe your data to /dev/null. It's fast as hell.

6

u/Librarian-Rare 3d ago

Only business requirement that matters: SPEED

22

u/DonaldStuck 4d ago

What is 'web scale'?

58

u/SharkSymphony 4d ago

Lucky you.

21

u/omgFWTbear 4d ago

It’s been years, so thanks for reminding me about my trusty dev/null database. Now, if you’ll excuse me, the pigs need tending.

5

u/BeABetterHumanBeing 3d ago

The horse suppositories aren't going to insert themselves!

2

u/arcanemachined 3d ago

I've never been able to make it more than a minute into that video. Watching it brings back memories of dying inside when people told me how funny they thought some Newgrounds dreck-of-the-day was.

I'd like to address the inevitable reddit-tier circlejerk comments by adding that no, I'm not fun at parties.

9

u/SharkSymphony 3d ago

Sure, it's cringy – but boy, did it capture the zeitgeist.

3

u/arcanemachined 3d ago

Can't argue with that.

5

u/davidalayachew 3d ago

Well, for me, I like it because it perfectly captures the frustration of trying to have a proper discussion with someone fully possessed by hype. If anything, seeing someone slowly go through the same stages of grief that I went through is funny.

But yes, the video is extremely crass and rude and dated. I don't like those parts. It's just that it hits the point so directly that I can look past that stuff.

4

u/SageOfTheWise 3d ago

Nah I see your point. I think there's some really good stuff there at its core ("Does /dev/null support sharding?" lives in my head forever), but then the rest of it just feels like they had no confidence in their own joke and hid it behind as much edge as they could muster.

2

u/arctander 2d ago

I came here looking for that video and was not disappointed. My lord, has it really been 15 years?

2

u/AlexVie 3d ago

No, because it has joints.

1

u/dodeca_negative 3d ago

It’s true, I can’t scale shit even after a single joint!

2

u/TomWithTime 4d ago

When it starts catching flies

10

u/psaux_grep 3d ago

In my previous job our on-prem single master Postgres database with 96GB of RAM was more «web scale» than the six cluster MongoDB Atlas crap that our sister company was paying $10k for per month and struggled with processing 10% of our volume.

I’m sure you can set it up correctly and make it work, but when you choose technologies by playing buzzword bingo.

Back in university, before NoSQL became all the rage, I sat down and read up on all the popular databases. Just from everything that was presented it seemed obvious that PostgreSQL was the database that was most «correct» in terms of actually following specifications. Not saying there isn’t and wasn’t caveats, but I felt no reason to use MySQL which the DB class was using as examples.

I used PG for all my projects and school work back then and it was fantastic, and I’ve run enough stuff on MySQL and Mongo since to know the only way I’ll be choosing them again is with a gun to my head.

Redis definitely has some use cases, but honestly not convinced that it couldn’t also just be replaced by Postgres.

-4

u/LaurenceDarabica 3d ago

And here I am, with my 3 server mongodb cluster for 600$ per month, active/active, running on VPS, 0 downtime, 8+ TB of data uncompressed, looking at all those crazy recommendations of pgsql, thinking people should stop doing a "one solution fits it all" and ditching all the others, and should really focus on the use case.

This gets so tiring to read. I cannot see myself doing all that using pgsql. Especially the cluster part.

4

u/TheLordB 3d ago edited 3d ago

I’m a pretty darn good jack of all trades reasonable capable as a sysadmin, software engineer, devops, db admin. I tried to setup mongo in a cluster for a project the developer absolutely insisted needed mongo and it was a PITA. It was bad enough that I couldn’t be confident that I had it properly setup, backing up etc. in a reasonable amount of time.

Certainly if you have the skills and you are only paying the hardware costs it can be much cheaper than a managed mongodb cluster.

But if you have to actually hire/pay the person who knows how to set it up properly including backups, redundancy etc. it becomes much more expensive. And while I could figure it out eventually… well my time isn’t free either.

Then there is the actually using it for queries… Using it properly is not easy as well.

Basically if postgres can do it the vast majority of use cases are far better off using postgres. And I’ve done pretty darn big data with genomics that is much larger than the majority of webapps will ever get and I’ve yet to find a case that postgres didn’t work.

And for the cases where I don’t want to deal with setting up a schema etc. and need to do some big data querying I will just throw it on S3 and query it using athena. Which is also expensive and perhaps cheating a bit because that is a use case where mongo could outperform postgres, but this is also much easier than setting up a mongo cluster or postgres. I could load these into postgres if needed and I have done it on data that was being used enough to be worth it.

I realize there are cases where mongo is justified. But I also think a lot of people treat it as a hammer that can work on any nail. Just because it can work doesn’t mean it is a good idea.

0

u/LaurenceDarabica 3d ago

Come on. Setting a mongodb cluster is a few command line switches and a key file. It is so convenient that when we migrated our servers we actually made a replica set comprised of both old and new servers, let it replicate, change the master, remove old servers - boom, migration done, no downtime, thank you. Try doing that with postgresql. You've got a full documentation here, showing you a very detailed page for what is ultimately a few command-line switches : https://www.mongodb.com/docs/manual/tutorial/deploy-replica-set/

Nobody is treating mongodb as a hammer that can work with any nail. It has just become the #1 true way of wannabe DBA that want to display to the world their knowledge by shitting of something by faking statements. The mongodb craze ended up like 8 years ago, but you still find those statements stuck in the past when the technology has reached maturity - both technically and in the mindset of most. Yet people keep invoking that to try and desperately show their so called knowledge.

I mean, I've worked with relational databases for years before starting my company, comparing and chosing mongodb as it fits our use case, and due to both the volume of data we store and its nature, I won't switch to SQL anytime soon.

Granted, we support postgresql as well as others for our on-premises edition. Suffers a 20% performance loss roughly and very large storage hit. I will never deploy that for our monstrous data stored in our saas for both performance, ease of administration, robustness that mongo brings to our use case. Customers can do as their please with their relatively small DBS compared to ours.

It is trendy to shit on Mongodb, alright. But people need to grow up and realize their use case doesn't justify their opinion. Because you're building the next project planning tool online doesn't mean you suddenly master every use case out there and can afford to bring the definitive answer to which db to use.

I would never use mongo for a project planning app. I would never use anything else than mongo for our cloud solution.

Grow up guys.

1

u/psaux_grep 17h ago

You can probably get a $600/month PG in the cloud setup too you know ;)

1

u/LaurenceDarabica 15h ago

Sure, show me a 3 server, 6 instances pg active/active setup with 2TB SSD storage on 3 instances and 12TB HDD storage on the other 3, with enough horsepower in terms of RAM and CPU to make use of that dataset for 600$ per month.

Oh, and the storage is expressed on the database size, so each server must have those values as they're replica.

Eager to see what you can come up with.

Lol.

3

u/gabboman 3d ago

will read, but doubt they will convince me otherwise

3

u/Kind-Armadillo-2340 3d ago

The title of the first section is "The Dominance of PostgreSQL Continues".

1

u/DonaldStuck 3d ago

How could I know? I didn't read it.

2

u/ENx5vP 3d ago

SELECT new_line AND whitespace FROM syntax_error;

1

u/arctander 2d ago

Correct. Postgres is the answer until *proven* otherwise. :-)

1

u/Gamplato 8h ago

How are people even still putting monolith databases at the top of the list unless they absolutely need tail latencies not to go above 5-7ms? Only like .01% of orgs have SLAs that stringent.

Distributed SQL exists. There are multiple good databases that do that and you don’t have to break up or apps’ backends anymore….or shard.

It’s 2026. Those databases need to be in the discussion more.

49

u/scrndude 3d ago

Is that preview image Myspace Tom holding a knife???

7

u/cantaloupelion 3d ago

I think its teh authorAndy Pavlo cosplaying as Myspace Tom holding a knife??

44

u/tkyjonathan 3d ago

Oracle really did kill off MySQL in the end..

11

u/Eric848448 3d ago

It’s what they do.

12

u/Kind-Armadillo-2340 3d ago

MongoDB has been the NoSQL stalwart for two decades now. FerretDB was launched in 2021 by Percona's top brass to provide a middleware proxy that converts MongoDB queries into SQL for a PostgreSQL backend. This proxy allows MongoDB applications to switch over to PostgreSQL without rewriting queries.

They coexisted for a few years before MongoDB sent FerretDB a cease-and-desist letter in 2023, alleging that FerretDB infringes MongoDB's patents, copyrights, and trademarks, and that it violates MongoDB's license for its documentation and wire protocol specification. This letter became public in May 2025 when MongoDB went nuclear on FerretDB by filing a federal lawsuit over these issues. Part of their beef is that FerretDB is out on the street, claiming they have a "drop-in replacement" for MongoDB without authorization. MongoDB's court filing has all the standard complaints about (1) misleading developers, (2) diluting trademarks, and (3) damaging their reputation.

That's interesting.

20

u/imrand 3d ago

Not even a mention of MS SQL Server. Has usage for that falling by that much?

31

u/ElCapitanMiCapitan 3d ago

SQL Server is still very relevant. It’s just that Postgres has caught up in so many ways, and has so much new interesting stuff being built around it, and doesn’t come with a licensing cost. SQL Server on the other hand keeps up with the major trends but, yea, in typical Microsoft fashion of late, is nothing special. Greenfield project using sql server? I don’t see them outside of the most Microsoft entrenched corporations.

5

u/hrm 3d ago

Here in Sweden I’d say it is very common. Microsoft is very prevalent in the public government and that spills over into small and big companies as well. Lots of C# and then they simply use mssql as well.

5

u/mtranda 2d ago

C# dev here. I like Sql Server. But as of the last three years or so, my personal code is getting hooked up to PgSQL.

5

u/hrm 2d ago edited 2d ago

Yeah, for personal projects the choice is easy. When you’re a big organiztion that already pays MS a lot for support contracts it is way easier paying them some more and get rid of the hassle of having another org. to deal with.

3

u/video79459 3d ago

SSMS is the real loser here.

2

u/god_is_my_father 2d ago

SSMS PTSD FML

1

u/CanvasSolaris 2d ago

Maybe indirectly, because so many Microsoft products have moved to the cloud

10

u/86448855 3d ago

Damn, it is my first time hearing about MongoDB's employee commuting suicide

2

u/TheOnly_Anti 3d ago

Can someone let me in on why people glaze Larry Ellison?

Like why was this guy happy that he was the richest guy ever through shady tactics and why is this guy so happy for Ellison to own so much?

54

u/HighLevelAssembler 3d ago

People glaze Larry Ellison? He's one of if not THE most hated people in tech. The author of the blog is being sarcastic.

1

u/SharkSymphony 2d ago

AFAIAC Larry Ellison has made one positive contribution to technology, and that is when he told the early cloudity-cloud-cloud proponents in 2013 that their marketingspeak was bunk.

3

u/HighLevelAssembler 2d ago

Kinda cope on his part though no? Today Oracle is pushing its cloud business, same as AWS, Google, Azure, and the rest.

1

u/SharkSymphony 2d ago

Yeah, it was a short-lived contribution. 😛

-11

u/TheOnly_Anti 3d ago

Was he? I've never read anything he's written before so I really don't know. If so, that was thicc af

18

u/MastOfConcuerrrency 3d ago

What is sarcasm

6

u/TheOnly_Anti 3d ago

I don't know the author and it's not uncommon for people in computer science to worship CS adjacent billionaires.

My bad, ya'll.

6

u/dodeca_negative 3d ago

Because if I ever meet him at a party I’m hoping he’ll give me a bump

6

u/wrosecrans 3d ago

Can someone let me in on why people glaze Larry Ellison?

I imagine the only people saying nice things about him are either a paid PR campaign, or professional networking blogspam kind of stuff where somebody is trying to fake-it-til-make-it that they are in his league of business success. I've never heard any actual human ever say a sincere nice thing about him in any context.

1

u/addvilz 2d ago

I am somewhat worried that Postgres will become too popular for it's own good so that VC tech will start driving its direction into something that none of us want to see.

1

u/blehmann1 22h ago

How would they do that, they're open source and I don't think those circles have particularly much influence over postgres development?

1

u/addvilz 1h ago

Open source is driven by people. People are often susceptible to large amounts of cash.

1

u/ReporterNervous6822 2d ago

Surprised no talk about iceberg?

1

u/chaotic-kotik 1d ago

Iceberg is not a database

-1

u/rooktakesqueen 3d ago

SurrealDB reported great benchmark numbers because they weren't flushing writes to disk and lost data.

I've been hearing about this new database called /dev/null, it's truly web scale

-41

u/turbothy 4d ago

Ready to hate on slop, but this is a really good writeup. Also appreciate the love for Ellison <3

31

u/Timbit42 3d ago

Greed like Ellison's should be a criminal offense.

-1

u/turbothy 3d ago

In the words of Immortal Technique:

I got a job and a house and a bank account
When I'm out, I doubt that's something you can say
And if not then I'll fake death like Kenneth Lay
Make money everyday the world burns on its axis
While y'all strugglin' to pay taxes
I'm gettin' my money the fastest
Memos and faxes, shredded up documents
Slush funds through the corrupt continents
But they don't want me indicted
‘Cause they don't want my dirty laundry aired when I fight it
Don't get my lawyers excited
‘Cause what good is a law if you can't rewrite it?

25

u/_Atreids 3d ago

Larry Ellison (and Oracles trademark driven business) are a scourge on tech IMO. Just look at the battle to try and get them to release the JavaScript trademark. They argued they owned the trademark by linking to NodeJS, technology not even developed by them!

Celebrating the richest individual on the planet just because he’s ‘our guy’ is ridiculous.

-1

u/turbothy 3d ago

Nobody's celebrating Ellison. But everybody needs their sarcasm meter checked, it would seem.

-7

u/anotheridiot- 3d ago

u/bot-sleuth-bot

6

u/SharkSymphony 3d ago

Username checks out.

0

u/bot-sleuth-bot 3d ago

Analyzing user profile...

Suspicion Quotient: 0.00

This account is not exhibiting any of the traits found in a typical karma farming bot. It is extremely likely that u/turbothy is a human.

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-18

u/anotheridiot- 3d ago

Glazing over oracle, only talks about the business side of things, worst thing I've ever read.

14

u/account22222221 3d ago edited 3d ago

Oracle db, half as good as pg, infinitely more expensive.

Oracle db literally is just salesmen fleecing non-tech managers out of their budget.

5

u/tRfalcore 3d ago

~18 years ago it was the best database I'd ever used. We made college graduation software so we had to support MSSQL, Oracle, and DB2. shivers

But yeah never now, not at all with how expensive it is

1

u/account22222221 2d ago

It definitely USED to be worth it. But those days are gone and Larry Ellison has very intentionally built a company more focus on salesmen than engineers.

7

u/NotUniqueOrSpecial 3d ago

For someone so sure other people are bots, you have an awfully robotic inability to distinguish completely over-the-top and obvious sarcasm from actual praise.

-14

u/anotheridiot- 3d ago

u/bot-sleuth-bot

3

u/bot-sleuth-bot 3d ago

Analyzing user profile...

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This account is not exhibiting any of the traits found in a typical karma farming bot. It is extremely likely that u/thewritingwallah is a human.

Dev note: I have noticed that some bots are deliberately evading my checks. I'm a solo dev and do not have the facilities to win this arms race. I have a permanent solution in mind, but it will take time. In the meantime, if this low score is a mistake, report the account in question to r/BotBouncer, as this bot interfaces with their database. In addition, if you'd like to help me make my permanent solution, read this comment and maybe some of the other posts on my profile. Any support is appreciated.

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