I'm working on a startup that connects to databases. Interested in finding out what the most popular DBs are for HN users. Can't list em all so add others in comments to be voted up.
<a href="http://wasitup.com" rel="nofollow">http://wasitup.com</a> uses Tokyo Tyrant, but I'm nearly finished with a rewrite to Redis. Tyrant was abandoned because of a nearly non-existent community, poor documentation, and some replication issues.<p>Redis was selected over MongoDB and Cassandra since it scales down, is lightweight (with virtual memory enabled memory is not an issue anymore), and extremely easy to install and manage.
At Mugasha we are musing MySQL and Redis. We recently started using redis to store a lot data related to our social features (activity stream, user suggestions, dashboard views). It also acts as a caching layer since data is stored in memory. I plan on developing many of our new features on top of redis as data store. We'll continue to use MYSQL as our db for persistence and manageability (backup/durability) sake.
Interesting that MongoDB has, at time of writing, more than 4 times the users of CouchDB. Both are document-based and have a JavaScript query language. MongoDB came out last year and CouchDB in 2005.
We're using Oracle much against my desires. While this was before I was there, they hit some issue with mySQL and someone in charge at the time (no longer there) pushed us to get Oracle to fix all the world's problems. Its too expensive and doesn't do enough of what we need unfortunately.
I like to make predictions about things, so my completely uninformed prediction is you're building an analytics app of some kind. there's lots of timestamped data sitting around in databases these days. might be nice to visually display it better.<p>another cool area might be analysis of data structures to predictably suggest better schemas for faster results, or better database engines, for example.
Hey Dan,
We started off hosting on Heroku, which at the time defaulted to using postgres. It now supports mysql as well I believe. We never really needed to worry about the db using a framework like Rails.<p>In my experience, MySQL and PostgresSQL are both awesome choices, and the community support behind them is huge.
Anybody out there using neo4j?<p>Looked at using it for an app I've been hacking on. Getting it to market seemed faster to do on a traditional rdbms, but I may migrate later once I incorporate collaborative filtering. Just curious if anyone has significant experience with it :)
MySQL for day to day stuff/existing software, Postgres for a new project, and Sqlite for unit testing (since it has an in memory database, which is awesome).<p>Playing around with the document/NoSQL databases, but nothing in production yet.
I love how everyone is weighing in with which DBs are the best without actually mentioning the usage or deployment patterns. You can't discuss faults or merits without knowing what it's going to be used for!
<a href="http://w3counter.com" rel="nofollow">http://w3counter.com</a> uses MongoDB capped collections which are aggregated into partitioned MySQL databases.