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I am somewhat shocked to find that an RDBMS is considered a “loaded footgun” in 2021. Perhaps grandparent isn’t the most charitable in their interpretation, but I am in full agreement. It continues to astound me how little about the basics of databases most developers know, and how strongly resistant they are to trying to learn.

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An RDBMS that scales infinitely while charging you per-row goes against the usual assumptions learned in the past decades, so I'd say yes that's a loaded footgun.

Have a friend who had a BigQuery query that ended up costing $3k each time. It ran for only a minute, because BigQuery chews through data really fast. But you don't realize that when you push the run query button. And there's no spend guard rails. They switched to pay for given amount of parallelism after that.

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