Hacker News Reader

Not necessarily. Most database libraries support SQLite as an option, and if you must use PostgreSQL or MySQL, then having a container app solves those purposes nicely. Personally I'd like to see more applications move to file based storage, which scales more easily on distributed storage systems.

View on HN

Again, it really depends on the application.

Maintaining multiple sources of truth is hard, especially if multiple people are working on the same data.

File systems can be used similar to a database with user locking as well. I'm not suggesting it doesn't come with new challenges but the apps I've used that write and read from files are pretty phenomenal and much easier to scale.

File systems are not a replacement for a database.

Files store information. Databases store information. Structuring data into folders and files to store data is not much different than structuring data in a file to store data.

Data structure is only a small part of what a database gets you.

Have you actually done this in production?

What was the user load like? Performance / latency?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com