The PRQL: Do We Need a Dedicated Database for Every Use Case?

January 16, 2023

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Joran Greef of Tiger Beetle.

Notes:

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Transcription:

Eric Dodds 00:05
Welcome to The Data Stack Show prequel where we talk about the show we just recorded to give you a sneak peek, Kostas, the big question that this show starts to answer, but then I’m going to ask you to tease the audience is, do we need a use case specific database, or every individual use case out there? And the context is that we talked with Yoran, from tiger beetle, which is an extremely fast database for double entry accounting. And so the question that pops up, which we talked about on a recent shoptalk episode is why so many databases? So do you think that this is an anti pattern? Or do you think that this is the way that things are going in the future?

Kostas Pardalis 00:56
That’s a very good question. For me, it’s very exciting to see that this is happening. I don’t know if it ends up bias, because I felt like that start right. At the end of the market, they’ll have to decide if it makes sense or not. So we have to wait a bit longer to see that, but I think it is time for if we managed to get to a point where okay, it’s not like we are going to have a database system for every, like, small use case. Like with a huge, long tail of use cases. But there are a couple of them big enough, I think we’re having specialized database systems like makes a lot of sense. And does we reach a point where we can not solve problems anymore by just throwing more servers, they’re just bigger as there’s going to be let’s the actual nation in the way that like we progressed with hardware level will have to focus more on optimizing and building solutions for specific problems. So yeah, like for me, it feels like it will happen eventually, especially as we have more than more tooling around you know, having the fundamental tools out there to build and Cobos database systems. And not having to build everything like from first principles have to wait like for a decade like to get something to market rise. So the atrium flags, the stars hub aligns. That will swing. But why, like, I also appreciate you know, out there and like dygert middleware. Yeah, they have these believe that it makes sense to do that. And they go after it, too, although it’s my it’s like going through something about, like today’s key?

Eric Dodds 03:07
Well, sure. Yeah, I agree. I think, a couple of highlights that I thought were really fascinating as strains of all the conversation topics you just mentioned, we’re one the tooling that’s now available for people who are building databases, right. Like you said, we’ve sort of finally reached a place where this can happen pretty rapidly in ways that it actually couldn’t before. And you’re in talked really specifically about some of those things, you know, technologies that came out of Dropbox and other major technology developers, which was really interesting. So the actual toolkit available is changing the game. And then the other thing that I loved was talking with your and just about how a passion for trying to make something fast or performance or safe, in and of itself can be a really motivating factor. And so I think we got to see a side of your end that was pretty unique. You know, especially when you consider people who have a drive to build something like tiger beetle. And so it was neat to get, you know, sort of a personal anecdote from him about how he just loves solving those problems for speedy as a need for speed. So definitely tune in. Absolutely fascinating conversation. Of course, subscribe if you haven’t tell a friend and we will catch you on the next one.