Which database do you have the most experience with? 🤔

Excel.

@Fast-Nop That's not a database, it's a functional programming language.

What is a database for you...?

What about you?

A json file 😄

Oracle, unfortunately

XML?

brainfuck

MySQL

Postgres, SQLite3, Elasticsearch, Snowflake, MongoDB

In that order. I player around with Access, ChromaDB, DynamoDB and something I can't even Remember, but I wouldnt call that experience.

Postgres.

i have lots of experience in [abstracting it enough so that the actual db choice doesn't matter while keeping your brain free from garbage like stored procedures] and i love it.

@tosensei

RDBMS - possible.

But specialized databases like Scylla / Cassandra / Chroma / Pinecone / ........

Nope... Not possible.

@IntrusionCM but then again - when do you ever need one of those?

what was it called again? poggers? postergé? whatever, this thing

@tosensei uhm.

I'm kinda tempted to write: "when your programming gets serious..."

But joke aside. When you need it.

Vectorized databases are trending because of machine learning.

Colum oriented databases like Scylla (or Cassandra) for heavy write applications which need to be resilient as fuck.

KV databases for heavy read applications, Redis as one example.

Document oriented databases with inverted indices like Elastic, Opensearch, Lucene for anything that combines text analysis with aggregation or similar tasks.

I was never really a fan of graph oriented databases... Not saying they're bad, just a tad too specialized in my opinion.

Time oriented databases... Loki, Prometheus, Victoria Metrics, OpenTSDB... You want metrics, you need these.

Hierarchical databases like LDAP. They are literally the backbone of any company.

There are way more...

You usually know that you need them when you're fucked cause - metaphorical - you try to take a pan to hammer a nail. Wrong tool.

@aviophille yep, that one!

@IntrusionCM please update your metaphor - in a pinch, a pan works better as a hammer than a hammer works as a screwdriver.

(with the latter being not a strong enough metaphor for some code i've seen over the years....)

@tosensei the metaphor fits pretty well.

You can do full text search in e.g. PostGres / MySQL / ... .

It works. Pain in the ass, but it works.

Same for the pan: It does the job, but your wall might take a lot of a collateral damage cause it is just not the right tool.

You can use windowing functions to overcome the "barrier" of the row oriented approach of databases as another example...

Theres always a solution based on compromises.

Postgres