50 Years of Choosing the Wrong Database: Lessons from History (and My Own Projects)
summary
Claims a practical framework and decision tree that result from reviewing fifty years of engines and running the checklist against dozens of real projects; describes building a short list, mapping SLOs, and documenting an architecture decision record. Names concrete tools and patterns — Spanner, FoundationDB, Cassandra, ClickHouse, LevelDB/RocksDB, vector databases — and shows a worked example choosing CockroachDB for multi‑tenancy. Ends with a downloadable cheat sheet and QR code linking the artifacts.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:09Why selecting right database hard
- 3:15Database types confusion
- 5:24Timeline 1970s to 2000s
- 10:46Birth of NoSQL drivers
- 13:15Scalability solutions
- 16:46Polyglot persistence challenges
- 19:17NewSQL breaking CAP
- 22:30Cloud-native databases
- 25:24Vector databases in AI
- 28:57Key takeaways
- 31:52Choosing right database
- 36:05Practical selection framework
- 41:05Q&A
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