Analyzing database trends through 1.8M Hacker News headlines
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While in a way it's just a corollary on the expensive bit, the license compliance of the same becomes such a monumental hassle as well, and is just an enormous time waste for everyone involved. For everything you want to do there's a probing Microsoft or Oracle salesperson trying to shake you down a little harder.
Go with Postgres et al and you can be geographically distributing, horizontally and vertically scaling in a million ways, making whatever warm of cold standby or recovery system you want, and so on. Even when the pricing of the enterprise offerings were tolerable, the system around constantly extracting a pound of flesh is so overbearing it induces opposition.
You asked for one via Which web app or startup uses them? :)
Also, 90% of the web are either cat memes and stupidly insane things like social media and video streaming shit platforms
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular...
Well with that question you neatly define the bubble that you inhabit.
https://db-engines.com/en/ranking ranks Oracle at number 1 and MS Sql Server at number 3, their method being a broad range of statistics based on job offers and web search statistics.
It doesn't though, all it tells you is that it's missing from the headlines in the submissions.
"Enterprise" is discussed on HN too, but inside submissions that aren't exclusively about MS Sql Server. Try searching for some terms on the Algolia HN search, order by date and filter by comments and you'll find the subthreads/submissions where it's discussed :)
Wrote up this query:
SELECT
db_name,
sum(if(type = 'comment', 1, 0)) AS comment_mentions,
sum(if(type = 'story', 1, 0)) AS post_mentions,
count(*) AS total_mentions,
sum(score) as total_score
FROM hackernews
ARRAY JOIN
extractAll(replaceAll(LOWER(text), ' ', ''), '(sqlite|postgres|mysql|mongodb|redis|clickhouse|mariadb|oracle|sqlserver|duckdb)') AS db_name
WHERE toYear(time) >= 2022
GROUP BY
db_name
ORDER BY
post_mentions DESC;Does play.clickhouse contain all the HN data so that we can play with it?
I was wondering the same, but I'm not sure if it would make a major change in the graphs. MySQL and MariaDB have both been unpopular on Hacker News for many years. Submissions on either topic rarely get much traction, which then leads to fewer submissions.
> MySQL trending downwards would make sense as people upgrade and switch over.
No, most large MySQL users are still using MySQL; there hasn't been a widespread migration to MariaDB. They're both actively developed and have grown in slightly different directions. Among corporations, MySQL's usage still far outstrips MariaDB by a significant degree. Lately MariaDB has better product velocity though, and their commercial enterprise finally seems to have stable footing.
I don't think I even knew I was running MariaDB at first, or perhaps more as a side note that I saw it dropping in mariadb when I apt installed mysql. If you upgraded Debian some time ago, I'm pretty certain you were automatically migrated, so anyone running that (or, presumably, one of the derivatives like Ubuntu) would have migrated knowingly or unknowingly, hence my assumption
And then there's all the users of managed cloud database offerings (RDS, Cloud SQL, etc) who definitely don't accidentally switch database vendors in that manner. Google Cloud doesn't even offer managed MariaDB, and Azure is retiring their managed MariaDB product.
Also keep in mind MariaDB hasn't been fully drop-in compatible with MySQL for over a decade. They've increasingly diverged in features and minor syntax differences over time.
Just to be clear, I'm not bashing MariaDB, I quite like it as a database. But there's a lot of misconceptions about the relative usage levels of MariaDB vs MySQL among FOSS circles.
It may not be as widespread as MySQL, but that's no surprise; despite HN's disdain, MySQL is still one of the most widely-used open source databases in existence.
There are some people here who are interested in corporate Europe or <insert Microsoft foothold place/industry here>, but most are aligned with Silicon Valley hackers.
Whereas something like Postgres has a plethora of forks and tools built around it, because it's open source devs can actually do interesting things to solve their problems.
Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is that all of the proprietary vendors are quietly strangling their flagship products.
Free and open source database engines were always “nipping at their heels” but weren’t a serious threat for decades. Only other proprietary engines were.
Now that PostgreSQL has more features than SQL Server and better performance, it’s a serious competitor.
But Microsoft is holding MSSQL’s face under water with core-based licensing. It means that per dollar you get dozens of times less compute available for your data than with open-source systems. That ratio is growing exponentially, because they haven’t redone their pricing in… ever.
Oracle and DB2 are being similarly choked off at the same rate, so looking left and right at their direct competition their respective product managers haven’t noticed the problem, which is akin to Fuji and Kodak raising film prices in lockstep just as digital photography is taking off.
We’re entering the era of “kilocores”: single servers becoming available that have over a thousand cores. You can’t imagine what per-core licensing costs for something like that!
PS: I saw a similar dynamic play out in the network space with load balancers and “web accelerators” like NetScaler sold “by bandwidth” with a starter SKU as small as 2 Mbps. I kept trying to politely explain to the reps that the smallest cloud VMs can cheerfully put out 10 Gbps, and hence their product is a 500x decelerator. They eventually listened to someone and made it bandwidth-unlimited. Too late. Everyone uses NGINX now.
Proprietary compilers and developer tooling were similarly strangled, and have been completely replaced by free/open tools in all but a few niche areas such as embedded, hard realtime, and circuit design.
It all makes me wonder what is the biggest "dark" database, the one nobody on HN wants to talk about, but it's out there serving the most transactions.
Will try to update it with some more recent data later.
But I am stuck at the cloudflare cf turnstile challenge and when I do click on it and it works, it shows error occured try again.
So frustating since I was so curious.
My personal favourite depending on situations are postgres (technically supabase is postgres too),sqlite,duckdb,(valkey?)
I am just curious but guys what are your favourite options and why?
this shows that people are definitely rotating out of "web technologies" in general, not because they aren't useful, but because the money isn't there anymore.
perhaps a large chunk have switched to AI hype trains, and it would be interesting to compare raw results of different AI headlines, but i suspect maybe 30% of people have left tech all together.
but my suspicion without evidence is that the gross number of people in the industry is actually dropping, though it should be increasing.
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a great start and much more enjoyable than writing the sql or for loops myself :)
I remember downloading it a few years ago, but the bookmark I have is dead. where is it now? is it still public?
It's really fantastic. Continuously updated and fast anonymous queries. Big kudos to ClickHouse.
On the analytics side of things we are starting to use DuckDB for some development efforts, but we are keen on potentially replacing some or all of our Snowflake usage with DuckDB.
It is a especially bad choice considering that a lot of the data stored in it is IoT-like and the system creates a single document per event :facepalm:
Because MongoDB is webscale.