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Oh I've been thinking a lot about this! It might not be the answer you're looking for since they're all very UX-related and not particularly database-specific,

Oh I've been thinking a lot about this! It might not be the answer you're looking for since they're all very UX-related and not particularly database-specific, however I have a few ideas. Sometimes I feel like databases were created by people who never built a website before. Most websites are pretty similar, and databases historically have never felt (to me at least) "modern". I always feel like I'm fighting against them, and making usability concessions for the sake of performance. First, the ability to subscribe to external data sets. I feel like I spend so much time writing crappy syncing code with external APIs (like Clearbit, GitHub, etc), and it would be so much nicer if I could just "connect" with them and know it will be fairly up to date. I also think there's so many things everyone finds themselves redoing for no reason. For example, almost every site on the internet as a user database with sessions, and each user has an email (that must be valid + verified), a password (that's encrypted + salted) and 2FA (which everyone is basically implementing themselves). It'd be so nice if the database just "knew" it was a user, and you were tweaking the presets rather than building it from scratch. Every single company has similar workflows they each solve themselves (often in insecure ways): they all have a production database, staging environments, migrations, direct access for customer support to fix things, local db access/clones for development, etc. I'd LOVE a database that was created with all these use-cases in mind... such as a way to connect to a DB locally but scrub sensitive data, take care of migrations seamlessly, etc. This might be a bit too "in a magical world"-y, but I'd love to not have to think about tradeoffs. Kind of like an automatic car, I'd love my database to be able to shift based on the types of data and amount of read/writes. At my company, we have 3-4 different databases for different reasons (Mongo, REDIS, ElasticSearch, ClickHouse), and it gets really difficult to keep all the data synced and connect them behind the scenes. I'd love to just never have to think about the low-level data store ever again, and have the DB do all the work without us having to worry. There's a number of primitives that I think are used a lot, and it'd be amazing if they were built in. For example, time. It'd be great to easily get the difference between two times, or total the times of a bunch of rows. Airtable has a time primitive, and it's amazing how much friendlier it is to use. Overall, I'd also love it to just feel a lot more like Airtable, including an Airtable-like interface for working with it (right down to the ability to create custom views and create on-the-fly forms people can submit data to). I honestly use Airtable for most of my DB needs these days (for one-off small projects), and it's such a delight to use. Maybe I'm underestimating the importance but... I feel like databases are pretty performant these days. I hope that we can start seeing dramatic UX improvements, since we don't have to optimize for performance the same way we have in the past.

laurent92 5y ago
What I would like best about a database would be to be in a file, in the data directory of the website. Snapshot the filesystem, snapshot the db. SSH the filesystem and the db exists elsewhere. I wouldn’t have to deal with the db at all, since it would be part of the website files. Most Wordpress sites would fit in SQLite easily. Using Wordpress would be like opening a Word document. Postgresql can’t do that, since the binaries are CPU-specific and under BSD license.
- magicalhippo 5y ago
  The SQLite WASM version[1] showcased here a few times does just that. [1]: http://static.wiki/ http://static.wiki/
- psanford 5y ago
  There's a bunch of projects that have implemented this. I wrote a SQLite VFS in Go that lets you query a read-only SQLite db over http (including from s3) [0]. The VFS API offers the possibility for weirder storage solutions, if thats the type of thing you're into. Recently I've been moving some of my personal websites hosted on AWS Lambda over to use a read/write sqlite db backed by DynamoDB[1]. There are a bunch of limitations to this type of thing (like it uses a global write lock), but it works nicely for DBs that have low write frequency. [0]: https://github.com/psanford/sqlite3vfshttp https://github.com/psanford/sqlite3vfshttp [1]: https://github.com/psanford/donutdb https://github.com/psanford/donutdb
CRConrad 5y ago
> Sometimes I feel like databases were created by people who never built a website before. Yeah, well, no big wonder: Many database systems were created long before the Web.
- gkoberger 5y ago
  I mean, Mongo came out in 2009 and Amazon predates both MySQL and Postgres. I will say my criticism doesn't apply to Firebase; they definitely do a lot of the things I mentioned. My only issue with Firebase is that it's very much intended to be used directly with a realtime frontend.

laurent92 5y ago

What I would like best about a database would be to be in a file, in the data directory of the website. Snapshot the filesystem, snapshot the db. SSH the filesystem and the db exists elsewhere. I wouldn’t have to deal with the db at all, since it would be part of the website files. Most Wordpress sites would fit in SQLite easily. Using Wordpress would be like opening a Word document. Postgresql can’t do that, since the binaries are CPU-specific and under BSD license.

magicalhippo 5y ago
The SQLite WASM version[1] showcased here a few times does just that. [1]: http://static.wiki/ http://static.wiki/
psanford 5y ago
There's a bunch of projects that have implemented this. I wrote a SQLite VFS in Go that lets you query a read-only SQLite db over http (including from s3) [0]. The VFS API offers the possibility for weirder storage solutions, if thats the type of thing you're into. Recently I've been moving some of my personal websites hosted on AWS Lambda over to use a read/write sqlite db backed by DynamoDB[1]. There are a bunch of limitations to this type of thing (like it uses a global write lock), but it works nicely for DBs that have low write frequency. [0]: https://github.com/psanford/sqlite3vfshttp https://github.com/psanford/sqlite3vfshttp [1]: https://github.com/psanford/donutdb https://github.com/psanford/donutdb

CRConrad 5y ago

> Sometimes I feel like databases were created by people who never built a website before. Yeah, well, no big wonder: Many database systems were created long before the Web.

gkoberger 5y ago
I mean, Mongo came out in 2009 and Amazon predates both MySQL and Postgres. I will say my criticism doesn't apply to Firebase; they definitely do a lot of the things I mentioned. My only issue with Firebase is that it's very much intended to be used directly with a realtime frontend.