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Comment by tmsh | Hacker News Reader

In 2024 all major cloud providers have NoSQL (AWS DynamoDB and its equivalents) that will easily scale to beyond this use case, managed purely by good single table design. That is the best practice for this and most basic use cases — not RDBMS in 2024.

Why? key/value data stores have consistent hashing which scales to planet scale built in. No need for sharding or caching or other bs that brings down slack and GitHub every other month.

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Most applications don't need planet scale, though.

I know cases where caches on top of a kv store improved performance a lot. I don’t think it’s as simple as you claim.

do you have a reference to how this might be accomplished? how do you avoid high read / write latencies if you put everything into a single table / key-value pair per user?

I think they're referring to single-table data design as described in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaEPXoXVf2k It's quite clever and scales well, but completely unnecessary for the vast majority of CRUD apps.

IMO it’s also difficult when you’re in the initial phases of a new company/product, because the system is evolving fast and that doesn’t play nice with single-table-design needing upfront design to work well.

I have had much better luck sticking to a plain old relational DB stack for those phases, because it’s fast to iterate, and then consider moving to single-table NOSQL when the system/DDD has “gelled” and traffic is starting to hockey-stick

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