Right. I should have done such a thing years ago. And, there are free/elastically scaled commercial RDBMS that are cheap. Oracle just give them away these days

Right. I should have done such a thing years ago. And, there are free/elastically scaled commercial RDBMS that are cheap. Oracle just give them away these days in the cloud. Even if you self-host, you can run small databases (up to iirc 12GB of data) for free, which is plenty for many internal apps. The other thing that is super-unintuitive is the cost of cloud managed DBs. People like open source DBs because they see them as cheap and lacking lockin. I specced out what it costs to host a basic plain vanilla Postgres on AWS vs an Oracle DB on OCI at some point, and the latter was cheaper despite having far more features. Mostly because the Postgres didn't scale elastically and the Oracle DB did, plus AWS is just expensive. Well that was a shock. I'd always assumed a commercial RDBMS was a sort of expensive luxury, but once you decide you don't want to self-admin the DB the cost differences become irrelevant. And then there's the lockin angle. Postgres doesn't do trademark enforcement so there's a lot of databases being advertised by cloud vendors as Postgres but are actually proprietary forks. The Jepsen test the other day was a wakeup call where an AWS "postgres" database didn't offer correct transactional isolation because of bugs in the forked code. If you're using cloud offerings you can end up depending on proprietary features or performance/scaling without realizing it. So yeah. It's just all way more complex than I used to appreciate. FoundationDB is still a very nice piece of tech, and makes sense for the very specific iCloud business Apple use it for, but I'm not sure I'd try to use it if I was being paid to solve a problem fast.