"However, in this day and age using them just feels a little ... lazy ... for most workloads." IN DEFENSE OF BEING LAZY AS A PROGRAMMER The essential mission

"However, in this day and age using them just feels a little ... lazy ... for most workloads." IN DEFENSE OF BEING LAZY AS A PROGRAMMER The essential mission of a computer programmer is to use computers to solve problems. Being lazy can come in one of two forms: 1) Solving problems badly or not solving them at all, or 2) Relying on someone else's solution instead of coming up with your own. Using a RDBMS is Type-2 Lazy. Now, I want you to get out a pen and paper and write this next bit down, because it is the most important thing you will ever learn: EVERYBODY SHOULD BE TYPE-2 LAZY BY DEFAULT, ONLY DEVIATING FROM THIS IF THERE IS A COMPELLING REASON NOT TO. Why? 1) Other people's solutions have been used, which means they've been tested in real-world use. Things you haven't thought of yet because you don't yet have a working solution have been at least discovered, because people are using it. Sometimes they're even addressed. 2) Other people's solutions may have tools, documentation and communities built around them, making them easier to learn about, use and work with. There are two decades of work put into Postgres itself, and even longer periods of work put into the general field of relational databases. Corner cases you can't even conceive of have been encountered and patched for. The entire codebase of Postgres contains large amounts of accumulated wisdom on how to store data in a safe and retrievable fashion. And large communities have sprung up, to provide you with tools and wisdom on how to use it to best suit your needs. NoSQL databases are useful for certain workloads and setups. It would be absolutely wrong to dismiss them out of hand. Having said that, anyone whose DEFAULT PREFERENCE is to eschew traditional RDBMS as a data store in favor of software that has been around for less than a quarter of the time that even the newer of the popular RDBMS systems have been around because using well-tested solutions is LAZY needs to have a restraining order keeping them at least 100 yards away from a keyboard.