Two sizes fit most: PostgreSQL and ClickHouse

Summary

Since the introduction of System R in 1974, relational databases in general, and SQL databases in particular, have risen to become the dominant approach to data persistence in the industry, and have maintained that dominance despite various significant challengers. Though some have rumored the death and decline of traditional relational databases, PostgreSQL has turned out to be an improvement on its predecessors, as well as its supposed successors. In fact, the open-source MySQL database was so ubiquitous that it became part of the eponymous LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl) that dominated early web development. The one big exception to this trend is OLAP, where specialized techniques that can drastically improve the performance of certain workloads have met with use-cases that actually require these techniques, with new contenders such as Clickhouse enabling qualitatively different approaches to analytics. One size does not fit all As often happens when a technology becomes dominant, it gets applied unthinkingly even when it may not actually be appropriate, and so all kinds of data was and is being pushed into general-purpose relational databases. Extreme examples could be found, such as developers creating remote Oracle databases for data sets with a total of 5 small elements (not columns, pieces of data) or Apple pushing their system logs into an SQLite database (a mistake they later corrected). Bind10 development started under the premise to solve scaling issues with Bind9 as DNS nameserver, using SQLite as backend. The DNS development was discontinued by ISC in 2014, and the OSS project Bundy remains inactive. PowerDNS focussed on performance scaling with MySQL/PostgreSQL early. In 2005, Michael Stonebraker, database researcher behind Ingres and later PostgreSQL, together with Uğur Çetintemel, penned a paper “One Size Fits All”: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone arguing that this had gone too far too long and backing up that argument with benchmark re...