Which is why me and people like me don’t care much what our relatives use :D

I think the majority of us also don’t want to play tech support.

I don’t.

Power cost depends. I use a thin client (J4105 CPU), and it idles at 4W. Idling is what it does 95% of the day. That power usage is lower than my modem, and a drop on the bucket compared to my (relatively low power) desktop PC. And I say that as a German who pays a disgusting 0.4€ per kWh.

Before I stopped fediverse, I was hosting lemmy on the cheapest hetzner ARM instance, with backups it was like 6€, so probably slightly below $7. Nextcloud has an ARM version so that would work.

Of course, only 40gb storage. I run nextcloud on an Intel VPS, it’s one of the few SSD + HDD offerings I’ve ever seen, and I got it on sale, so it’s less than 5€ paid yearly for 40GB + 500GB.

Edit: autocorrect

Yep — that is what I mean by documents, and it’s what I meant all along. The beauty of documents is how simple and flexible they are. Here’s a URL (or path), and here’s the contents of that URL. Done.

But that content is meaningless, because you just saved an arbitrary data structure. It’s not as if you can do anything with those postgres files. Or those possibly multi GB MSSQL .mdf, .ldf, .ndf documents. That’s data (a word that’s imo far clearer than document) stored in a very specific way that you need to know the exact structure of to make any sense of. It’s not usable directly in any way. Not “Done.”

No, because you can’t store “literally anything” in a Postgres database.

Yes you can. You can either add space for what you need to store, or you can, again, store e.g. a JSON blob.

if you put an index on this column, inserts will be too slow, if you don’t have an index on that column selects will be too slow

Or don’t, and it will only be as slow ass a NoSQL Database …

A document is always more work in the short term

It’s the opposite, a document db is far easier in the short term, that’s why everyone jumped on them before seeing the limitations.

Yeah, a relational DB is harder because you have to have a good design, that allows you to do what you actually want to do. And if you none of your devs are good at SQL, then probably a document db is better. And yes, sometimes, you need nothing but a document DB. But I still heavily disagree that most of the time you want one.

I’m 99% certain this is wrong

? This is how Postgres stores data, as documents, on the local filesystem:

Those are not documents for a definition of document that works with the rest of your comment. If by document you mean “any kind of data structure”, then yes, those are documents. But then the term becomes meaningless, as literally anything is a document.

Yep… it’s pretty easy to write a query on a moderately large database that returns 1kb of data and takes five minutes to execute. You won’t have that issue if your 1kb is a simple file on disk. It’ll read in a millisecond.

Sure, but then finding that document takes 5 minutes because you need to read a few million files first.

You should send that information to the non-native English speaker that wrote the blog. Might as well go ahead and gather all the other typos he did.

and it’s even how relational databases work under the hood. They generally persist data on the filesystem as documents.

I’m 99% certain this is wrong, which leads to a lot of your follow-up being wrong. Persisting data as documents would be atrocious for performance.

I also disagree with the quoted part of the article.

And for your case, sure, you could save it as document, maybe improve performance of a very light operation by 2X, just to have far worse performance for querying that data.

edit: And in case you don’t mind the extra storage, and don’t care about correctness guarantees, you can just have a table that has all the metadata, but then have the comment also as a JSON blob which every modern db supports.

I agree, it’s even what I mostly use the ORM for, writing is so easy that way and results in far more succinct code.

I’d actually say most data is suited for relational DBs, and that was pretty much what people realized after a few years of the NOSQL hypetrain.

Hey Google, use a picture of someone defending someone from someone angry ;)