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Comment by TickleSteve | Hacker News Reader

"Databases have always been and will always be the defining piece of any technological stack".

Sorry, I don't see this as true. Databases are no more "defining" of a tech stack than any other part, comms, security, ui, business logic, etc.

You only see it as "defining" if the database is your product. In most cases, the business logic is the defining part of the system, all parts of the tech stack should be replaceable.

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I would like to rebuttal. If there exists any dynamic application, you need some type of data store to keep all of the records, whether it be a persistent database or simply an in-memory database. So, in my opinion, this is a truthy statement.

Something you need isn't necessarily what defines you. We all need food and water but that's not what defines us -- at least not at the level of abstraction people care about. Google has a ton of databases, etc. but one would hardly call it a database company.

If you're architecting your application around a particular mechanism, be that a db or comms mechanism or whatever, then you're tightly coupled to it. This is a mistake.

Most applications need to store data, but most applications dont need to store data in a particular db.

Taking this attitude to your design is a great way to tank your performance before you've even started. I have seen too many projects suffer from overzealous architecture that treats the database as a persistence layer. Designs that start out trying to abstract away the persistence layer wind up building a complex caching layer.

I agree, I'm not arguing for complete abstractions here, just showing that the fact that you can abstract away the differences means that the db is not a "defining" part of the system.

A lot of the content of that blog post is just pompous, nebulous marketing speak. I wish they would talk more about the technical details (like release some numbers or benchmarks). The example is the only part that is really interesting. I guess technical people aren't its target audience?

True. I have no idea (having skimmed the post) why I would choose EdgeDB over any other.

I just saw lots of waffling.

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