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Programming discussions since 1842

Monday, December 24, 2012

What Databases Fix

Paul Graham showed an interesting way to compare programming languages: to describe each in terms of the problem it fixes. I have found out that this also works well for databases:

Oracle's DB: There are no enterprise databases

MySQL: Oracle isn't open-source.

MariaDB: We like MySQL but Oracle is evil.

PostgreSQL: MySQL doesn't have enough options.

SQLite: Let's just embed everything. Also, 4 datatypes should be enough for everyone.

MongoDB: Why do we need joins and schemas?

CouchDB: Why do we need collections?

Redis: Why do we need documents?

Memcached: Why do we need harddrives?

Neo4j: SQL doesn't have enough relations.

Bigtable: MongoDB isn't webscale enough.

Hbase: Bigtable isn't open-source.

Cassandra: Bigtable wasn't made at Facebook.

Riak: Cassandra wasn't written in Erlang.

OrientDB: Let's include everything in the same database!