What is your database of choice?

At the moment my preference is mongoDB however I am trying to get back up to speed with SQL so I can use PostgreSQL as well.

Comments

[Mike Rogers ✈️]

PostgreSQL! I used to use MySQL/MariaDB, but PostgreSQL seems to be normal choice for Rails devs, plus I have very few surprises with it.

I used MongoDB recently, while it was fun I realised how much I love having explicit migrations for DB columns.

[Andrew Baisden]

What do you use to interact with the database do you use a GUI or the CLI? I am currently trying out valentina-db.com/en/ and before that I used pgAdmin.

[Mike Rogers ✈️]

CLI & TablePlus.

I like the CLI (e.g. the rails console) as it gives me all the stuff my apps does. I normally use TablePlus as a read only view of what's going on.

[Abdisalan]

It really depends!

ACID Transactions + clear schema and enforced relationships between schema? PostgresQL or MySQ (probably just postgres haha)

Analytics + Performance for querying business logic? A Columnar Database.

Need to store documents? MongoDB or S3

Need super high performance? Cassandra

Need just key-value store? Use CouchDB or DynamoDB if you got the $$

[Garret]

What do you mean by if you have the money Dynamo? Dynamo is a super well priced database and its pay for what you use. Super super nice stuff.

[Abdisalan]

Good question, while it’s well priced I’ve experienced sudden spikes in price which sucked

[Garret]

Weird dynamo has really stable pricing of course prices will go up with usage so if you randomly spike the database at one point it will spike but other than that you can scale it up and down without having to do anything on your end so you are always paying the lowest price possible.

[Henry Adams]

Switched to PostgreSQL from SQL Server.
I had nothing against SQL Server, other than the fact that it is very windowscentric. PostgreSQL is just as powerful, plus I really like notifications system.

[leastbad]

Tell us more about PG notifications? I'd love to see an example of how it works.

[rhymes]

It's a basic pub/sub system. The DB sends events to connected clients. You have a channel where a client can be in listening mode on and the DB or other clients can send events to. For example: tapoueh.org/blog/2018/07/postgresq...

[Evaldas Buinauskas]

To be fair for comparison, SQL Server has service broker, which does the same. It also has became available on Linux recently 👌

But both are great RDBMSes!

[leastbad]

Wow, I haven't worked with SQL Server since Rails came out in 2004.

I have to say, it must have been a cold day in hell when they approved porting SQL Server to Linux. Good for them, though. The irony is that I am now back on Windows 10, running PG inside of a headless WSL2 Ubuntu VM.

[Rémy 🤖]

PostgreSQL is my choice because

• It is well supported by the Django ORM (and the Django ORM is fantastic, especially migrations-wise)
• It is ACID and conceptually correct
• It has all the features I ever needed (full text search, fuzzy matching, constraints, materialized views, ...)
• It is very widespread in managed database services (DigitalOcean, AWS, GCP, etc)
• Despite what the Uber monkeys think, it scales
• It has plenty of convenient types (arrays, hash maps, JSON) that let you be very flexible with how you represent your data (even get the flexibility of NoSQL when you need it)
• And of course you can index and query those types (yes you can make an indexed query deep into a JSON field)

[Andrew Baisden]

All good reasons I can see why its so popular now looking at all of these responses.

[Evaldas Buinauskas]

My rule of thumb is start with any modern relationshal database such as SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL and use NoSQL only when product needs very specific problem to be solved and database is designed for that specific use case

[Rhamses]

MongoDB on side projects and Neo4j at work, but I’m looking to learn Postgree as well, many projects that I have interest to contribute with use it alongside python (which I need to practice more as well)

[Andrew Baisden]

Python and SQL thats the stack I am trying to learn right now. It seems to be very good for job prospects.

[Rhamses]

That seems to be the choice to get into Data science and B.I stuff. I hope I start studying this soon

[Denis Sedchenko]

PostgreSQL is my standard choice for SQL.
All other options (NoSQL) are depends on project.

[Anders]

PostgreSQL, has been rock solid since the start. (Prior to that used SQL Server primarily (some real weird issues with that one)).

[Kyle Bernhardy]

Andrew,

Check out my company's product, HarperDB. It is NoSQL & SQL with a single underlying data model. So you can still execute NoSQL operations while getting up to speed on SQL. If you are interested & it fits your needs / use case you can spin up a free instance: harperdb.io/harperdb-cloud-get-sta...

[Andrew Baisden]

Cool thanks I will create an account and give it a try.

[Tom Holloway 🏕]

I'm still a bit sad about RethinkDB.

In any case these days my goto choice is MongoDB and PSQL (depending on the use case)