Ask HN: How did you accidentally build a database?

by islanderton 12/9/2023, 2:16 PMwith 1 comments

I get the feeling that most most projects tend to become more like databases as they grow in complexity. How did you realize that a project you have worked on was slowly becoming more like a database?

by surprisetalkon 12/9/2023, 9:53 PM

IMO the experience of “building a database” is entirely the fault of SQL and its lack of viable alternatives.

Modern DBs offer transactions, parallelism, caching, compression, and other magic behind the scenes. But few teams are willing to put up with SQL and PLPGSQL to reap those rewards. They’d rather build a half-baked version in Go or whatever, and they’re not wrong.