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Analyzing database trends through 1.8M Hacker News headlines
- Aachen 1y agoIs MariaDB included in MySQL? I see no mention of it in the post, but MySQL trending downwards would make sense as people upgrade and switch over. Besides of course novelty wearing off as posited for all engines further down the post
- evanelias 1y ago> Is MariaDB included in MySQL? I was wondering the same, but I'm not sure if it would make a major change in the graphs. MySQL and MariaDB have both been unpopular on Hacker News for many years. Submissions on either topic rarely get much traction, which then leads to fewer submissions. > MySQL trending downwards would make sense as people upgrade and switch over. No, most large MySQL users are still using MySQL; there hasn't been a widespread migration to MariaDB. They're both actively developed and have grown in slightly different directions. Among corporations, MySQL's usage still far outstrips MariaDB by a significant degree. Lately MariaDB has better product velocity though, and their commercial enterprise finally seems to have stable footing.
- Aachen 1y ago> there hasn't been a widespread migration to MariaDB I don't think I even knew I was running MariaDB at first, or perhaps more as a side note that I saw it dropping in mariadb when I apt installed mysql. If you upgraded Debian some time ago, I'm pretty certain you were automatically migrated, so anyone running that (or, presumably, one of the derivatives like Ubuntu) would have migrated knowingly or unknowingly, hence my assumption
- evanelias 1y agoSure, it's a common point of confusion specifically because a few major Linux distros did that. But SREs / DBAs / DBREs will generally take a much more rigorous approach to database version upgrades. Companies just don't tend to upgrade their important databases in that fashion, and ditto for operating systems if they self-host. And then there's all the users of managed cloud database offerings (RDS, Cloud SQL, etc) who definitely don't accidentally switch database vendors in that manner. Google Cloud doesn't even offer managed MariaDB, and Azure is retiring their managed MariaDB product. Also keep in mind MariaDB hasn't been fully drop-in compatible with MySQL for over a decade. They've increasingly diverged in features and minor syntax differences over time. Just to be clear, I'm not bashing MariaDB, I quite like it as a database. But there's a lot of misconceptions about the relative usage levels of MariaDB vs MySQL among FOSS circles.
- tonymet 1y agois anyone seriously using it? even their own brand facepile is pretty weak
- evanelias 1y agoMariaDB is widely used, including by some extremely high-traffic sites like Wikipedia [1], as well as some quite large multinational businesses [2]. It may not be as widespread as MySQL, but that's no surprise; despite HN's disdain, MySQL is still one of the most widely-used open source databases in existence. [1] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/MariaDB https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/MariaDB [2] https://mariadb.com/resources/customer-stories/ https://mariadb.com/resources/customer-stories/
- Aachen 1y agoTheir what now?
- tonymet 1y agoCustomer portfolio
- Aachen 1y agoOh, huh I don't think I ever in my life considered what one's brand portfolio is when selecting which technology stack is good. But that explains why so many websites have big brand names on their homepage like "oracle and uber use us!" if some people actually care about that
- tonymet 1y agoobviously prospects care .
- nsbk 1y agoSome of the insights match my personal experience and preferences. At $dayjob we're migrating from Mongo to TimescaleDB (now TigerData ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) which is basically a PostgreSQL extension for time series data and couldn't be happier. We are getting better performance and massive storage savings. On the analytics side of things we are starting to use DuckDB for some development efforts, but we are keen on potentially replacing some or all of our Snowflake usage with DuckDB.
- throw_m239339 1y agoCan you tell me, the scenarios you used MongoDB for? Because I'm still curious about why would anyone use MongoDB after all these years.
- CoastalCoder 1y ago> I'm still curious about why would anyone use MongoDB after all these years. Because MongoDB is webscale.
- nsbk 1y agoIt is the main database for a huge Rails app. They adopted Mongo right when its popularity started to decline. I always thought it was a very poor choice since the day I joined. It is a especially bad choice considering that a lot of the data stored in it is IoT-like and the system creates a single document per event :facepalm:
- beembeem 1y agoI'm sorry to hear about your bad experience. From your comment I take it that you weren't using a time-series collection to store data in mdb which uses industry-standard compression techniques?
- Aachen 1y agoThe data query tool linked at the bottom of the post doesn't work for me. Cloudflare shows error 600010, whatever that means. Nice that there is "no login required" but if it did, or allowed that option, maybe it wouldn't need an algorithm to decide whether my traffic is abusive because you could block abusive accounts instead
- jtbaker 1y agohttps://camelai.com/hackernews/ https://camelai.com/hackernews/? Worked for me.
- sega_sai 1y agoI am getting an infinite loop of 'Verify you are human'....
- vercantez 1y agoWe use cloudflare turnstile. Sometimes it blocks some VPNs. Very rarely it blocks some browsers.
- Aachen 1y agoNot on a VPN. Guess I can't use this browser then? So much for HTML/Ecmascript being standards anyone could implement...
- compumike 1y agoBlocks me too. (Infinite loop "Verifying...") Firefox on macOS. No VPN.
- tea-lover 1y agoIt does it "very rarely" if you only care about the most populated & richest areas of the world. It also blocks clients from the neglected "global south" all the time. FWIW, I too am stuck in a captcha loop, and these days I usually just bounce when I see Cloudflare captcha instead of trying to fight it. In your logs it probably looks like bot traffic.
- Tepix 1y agoSqlite seems to be growing recently which matches my perception, but it‘s not listed among the growing databases. Weird.
- RS-232 1y agoNo SQLite?
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoI really wanted to see the chat with HN data option or something https://camelai.com/hackernews/ https://camelai.com/hackernews/ But I am stuck at the cloudflare cf turnstile challenge and when I do click on it and it works, it shows error occured try again. So frustating since I was so curious.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoI almost knew that postgresql would be the winner just because of how much people recommend it here or literally anywhere. Postgres is cool. My personal favourite depending on situations are postgres (technically supabase is postgres too),sqlite,duckdb,(valkey?) I am just curious but guys what are your favourite options and why?
- 123yawaworht456 1y ago>a ClickHouse database of every HN story I remember downloading it a few years ago, but the bookmark I have is dead. where is it now? is it still public?
- xnx 1y agoHere: https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIG1heCh0aW1lKSBGUk9NIGhhY2tlcm5ld3NfaGlzdG9yeQ== https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIG1heCh0a... It's really fantastic. Continuously updated and fast anonymous queries. Big kudos to ClickHouse.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jabart 1y agoStill Public, still chews through million->billion or rows in seconds. Their Cloud version has some Cloud specific features. A few vendors have build custom thing on top or custom builds off the open source project too.
- chickenzzzzu 1y agothe funniest thing about this graph is that it proves there was a raw drop off in all popularities in the last 2 years, which of course directly coincides with the great layoffening that has been happening for almost 3 years now. this shows that people are definitely rotating out of "web technologies" in general, not because they aren't useful, but because the money isn't there anymore. perhaps a large chunk have switched to AI hype trains, and it would be interesting to compare raw results of different AI headlines, but i suspect maybe 30% of people have left tech all together.
- redwood 1y agoI think it's attention and mindshare going to AI
- chickenzzzzu 1y agowe would have to look at raw numbers, like, perhaps web tech is just "flat", not declining. but my suspicion without evidence is that the gross number of people in the industry is actually dropping, though it should be increasing.
- bellareed 1y agoThis would be an interesting request to directly ask the data. Which you can do using our "chat with hacker news data" free tool: https://camelai.com/hackernews/ https://camelai.com/hackernews/ No login required.
- chickenzzzzu 1y agothank you very much for suggesting that and for making it available without a login :)
- chickenzzzzu 1y agoi went there on mobile and asked two questions. it went pretty well from a UI and response quality perspective. the data they showed me didn't show any obvious trends, but i suspect it's because i didn't specify a long enough list of technologies, and that some general terms were included like "machine learning" and "llm" which had an effect of hiding the trends i was looking for. a great start and much more enjoyable than writing the sql or for loops myself :)
- kwillets 1y agoSnowflake seems to have peaked; 2023 was hellish dealing with roomfuls of inexperienced devs and even architects convinced it was the fastest cheapest thing ever.
- redwood 1y agoWell as pointed out above since Oracle and SQL Server don't even show up.. this simply does not reflect enterprise and Snowflake and Eatabricks both lean Enterprise
- xnx 1y agoWould be great to share the queries. Are these results weighted for storypoints and/or number of comments?
- xnx 1y agoConfusingly, I just came across the unrelated https://www.camel-ai.org/ https://www.camel-ai.org/ today.
- bellareed 1y agoSooo confusing. We've debated changing our name but can't bring ourselves to break up with our cute camel logo lol.
- esafak 1y agoFirst one to http://camel.ai/ http://camel.ai/ wins :)
- bellareed 1y agoI had a semi-viral tweet about my attempt to buy camel.ai useless domain squatter wants $40k for it! https://x.com/isabella_patane/status/1820987472287080867 https://x.com/isabella_patane/status/1820987472287080867
- bellareed 1y agoIf your curiosity inspires you to dig deeper into the data, our "chat with hacker news" free tool is available. No login required: https://camelai.com/hackernews/ https://camelai.com/hackernews/
- zurfer 1y agoUnfortunately, I only got data until 2022, but here is a similar overview with a few more charts and sentiment analysis: https://eu.getdot.ai/share/f3f0853d-fa91-4301-8fb2-52821b65e8cc?org_id=getdot.ai https://eu.getdot.ai/share/f3f0853d-fa91-4301-8fb2-52821b65e... Will try to update it with some more recent data later.
- 98codes 1y agoInteresting to see SQL Server not listed here, am curious whether it didn't have enough signal, or suffered from being a two-word product, with "SQL" being far too generic on its own.
- RadiozRadioz 1y agoIt is also less mentioned on the site in general, owing to it being a proprietary Microsoft product in an audience of people who primarily go for Free / Open Source non-Microsoft products. There are some people here who are interested in corporate Europe or <insert Microsoft foothold place/industry here>, but most are aligned with Silicon Valley hackers.
- pythonaut_16 1y agoSomeone else mentioned it already, but what is there to talk about with SQL Server (and Oracle)? Like I'm sure there's plenty someone could write about but generally it's pay Microsoft so it's their problem. Whereas something like Postgres has a plethora of forks and tools built around it, because it's open source devs can actually do interesting things to solve their problems.
- jiggawatts 1y agoI’ve also don’t remember SAP HANA, Oracle, or DB2 mentioned even once here but believe me, along with MSSQL these occupy most of the top ten database deployments world wide. Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is that all of the proprietary vendors are quietly strangling their flagship products. Free and open source database engines were always “nipping at their heels” but weren’t a serious threat for decades. Only other proprietary engines were. Now that PostgreSQL has more features than SQL Server and better performance, it’s a serious competitor. But Microsoft is holding MSSQL’s face under water with core-based licensing. It means that per dollar you get dozens of times less compute available for your data than with open-source systems. That ratio is growing exponentially, because they haven’t redone their pricing in… ever. Oracle and DB2 are being similarly choked off at the same rate, so looking left and right at their direct competition their respective product managers haven’t noticed the problem, which is akin to Fuji and Kodak raising film prices in lockstep just as digital photography is taking off. We’re entering the era of “kilocores”: single servers becoming available that have over a thousand cores. You can’t imagine what per-core licensing costs for something like that! PS: I saw a similar dynamic play out in the network space with load balancers and “web accelerators” like NetScaler sold “by bandwidth” with a starter SKU as small as 2 Mbps. I kept trying to politely explain to the reps that the smallest cloud VMs can cheerfully put out 10 Gbps, and hence their product is a 500x decelerator. They eventually listened to someone and made it bandwidth-unlimited. Too late. Everyone uses NGINX now.
- xnx 1y agoMore unsolicited feedback: Month-by-month is kind of noisy. You might do 3 month average to smooth it a little and make the trend clearer.
- vercantez 1y agoUPDATE: Added a weighted average analysis based on story points and comments. SQLite ranks highest in points per story and Redis ranks highest in comments per post. Also added SQLite to the growth table. I had accidentally deleted this row in the original post.
- conradkay 1y agoThere's an online playground with the data here: https://play.clickhouse.com/ https://play.clickhouse.com/ Wrote up this query: SELECT db_name, sum(if(type = 'comment', 1, 0)) AS comment_mentions, sum(if(type = 'story', 1, 0)) AS post_mentions, count(*) AS total_mentions, sum(score) as total_score FROM hackernews ARRAY JOIN extractAll(replaceAll(LOWER(text), ' ', ''), '(sqlite|postgres|mysql|mongodb|redis|clickhouse|mariadb|oracle|sqlserver|duckdb)') AS db_name WHERE toYear(time) >= 2022 GROUP BY db_name ORDER BY post_mentions DESC;
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoVery interesting, where does the play.clickhouse get its hackernews data from though? There isn't any url link from where it fetches. Does play.clickhouse contain all the HN data so that we can play with it?
- sceadu 1y agorelevant GH issue I think https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/29693 https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/29693
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoThat's really interesting; I knew postgres was the most popular database on here, but also looking at that chart, SQLite had a burst of popularity on HN last year.
- b0a04gl 1y ago[dead]
- esafak 1y agoHow are you handling sanitization? Anything interesting?
- markwclancy 1y agoAbsolute drivel. Comparing operational/transactional databases like MongoDB and Postgres to analytics / columnar datastores like Redshift and Snowflake is meaningless. You might as well as say "...the popularity of hammers is way up, with screwdrivers appearing to be in decline..". If this is the type of data analysis that AI is supporting, we're all in trouble.
- codeulike 1y agoMS Sql Server not even mentioned. This tells us there is a whole world almost totally omitted from discussion on HN: "Enterprise"
- diggan 1y ago> This tells us there is a whole world almost totally omitted from discussion on HN It doesn't though, all it tells you is that it's missing from the headlines in the submissions. "Enterprise" is discussed on HN too, but inside submissions that aren't exclusively about MS Sql Server. Try searching for some terms on the Algolia HN search, order by date and filter by comments and you'll find the subthreads/submissions where it's discussed :)
- fullstackchris 1y agoThere is a reason it is not even mentioned
- cheesekunator 1y agoAnd what's that reason .... ?
- thewebguyd 1y agoOracle isn't in there either, which goes to show how much of a bubble HN actually is considering MSSQL and Oracle are #1 and #2 in market share.
- bix6 1y agoAny commentary on DuckDB from users? I keep hearing about it but am not a user myself. Is it a fad or here to stay?
- jeffbee 1y agoIs it weird or just me that bigquery is mentioned, but bigtable and spanner are not? The article presents a grab-bag of database concepts that do not seem related. BigQuery and PostgreSQL are just fundamentally different things. It all makes me wonder what is the biggest "dark" database, the one nobody on HN wants to talk about, but it's out there serving the most transactions.