Comment by trueno

i think the topic of "what data backend" gets super conflated into many different variations of what the hell people need it for. discussions here go so many different directions. some people are building simple webapps, some are building complex webapps that need to scale for a gazillion users, some are building local apps, some are just tinkering, some are thinking broadly about how their backend needs to sync with a datalake->some data warehouse at an org, yadda yadda ya.

i personally like postgres myself for just about all use cases that must be shared with others (app with more than one client that might be providing CRUD updates or anything really that demands a central data store). ive used sqlite a couple times with WAL to try and make a small app shared between 2-3 people who all would contribute updates thru it but it wasnt ideal. for postgres so many features/extensions its concurrent writes are fast as hell and if you just want to one-shot a solution then you cant go wrong, but it's ofc not the same as sqlite setup.

i think a lot of the pain with postgres is just learning to effectively be a knowledgeable db admin of sorts. its somewhere between being a competent devops guy and a dbadmin expert all in one. if you're actually doing some kind of production deployment it is kinda scary hoping you've got everything set up right. even supabase which makes this whole process trivial to get going requires an understanding of not-always-understood security premises that just make things spooky.

lot of words to say i dont get much out of these discussions tbh. theres just too many use cases and variables in everyones working/hobby lives im not sure that there is a proverbial bottom to any of it. some will use sqlite and some will use postgres and some will use some weird thing no ones heard of because they're afraid to rawdog sql and just want immediate graphql capability to be the main mode of data retrieval. some will show up here and talk about why you need redis in the middle.

its too much noise so i just keep using postgres because its free and boring and fast. end of the day i just want to make stuff people can use. it's a hard endeavor to do well alone, if you dont have a team of other experts who can help you put all the puzzle pieces together on how to deploy things the right way and also add pieces like redis or whatever... it's just a lot. it's hard to find where to get started. sqlite is the only solution that really by nature of what it is seems to champion the lonely developer, but the tradeoffs are big if you're trying to make something that should get used by many people.