SQL or NoSQL: The Perspective of Someone who Uses Both in Production

SQL or NoSQL? This is a question I have spent the last year mulling over and in all honesty, I'm still not 100% sure. Both are great and have tons of use for any kind of app be in TypeScript, Python, Go, Ruby, Rust, whatever, but which is better?

Each one does something better than the other, and today I wanted to show that will a sort of real world example which I think does a pretty good job of showing the "why" behind my decisions here.

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0:00 into
1:49 pros and cons
9:36 REAL EXAMPLES

[fredrickdenga]

I love how you've clearly listed the points neatly side by side then going into them in detail⚡⚡

[hamzarashid]

Thank you for creating this fantastic video! It was exactly what I was searching for, and your explanation was excellent.

[Mooooov]

I agree that there is no one size fits all solution, but in general it’s fairly easy of a decision, at least imho.

SQL is better for any kind of OLTP workload.

Ignoring a few exceptions, NoSQL is generally a good fit for:
- write heavy applications
- analytical workloads

The only thing that bothers me: SQL vs NoSQL isn’t really a good comparison. SQL is basically always referring to a table oriented relational database, NoSQL basically to anything else.

For example, Redis is a NoSQL database, but does not have a whole lot in common with MongoDB, which is also a NoSQL solution. Both options don’t have a whole lot in common with Cassandra, another NoSQL database.

[doogilie]

I love your channel and this video came at a perfect time for me! Thank you!

[lovenangelodayola]

Thank you for sharing your ideas! Love this channel

[swagatochatterjee]

A very neat explanation in 20 mins. Great job!

[sergio.salvaterra]

pretty cool software you got with insiderviz, what stack did you use for it? i was thinking about making something similar myself.

[bashscript]

It's a good example you show with insider viz

[grechuli]

In case you have non-relational data, would Postgres with JSONB cover your needs?

[adjuvara]

Ben, you need the Patagonia zip sweater for financial branding 😂.

[kevinroosey]

I might be wrong here but did you accidentally flip flop the SQL vs NoSQL in the thumbnail?

[mr.random]

Thoughts of Graph db? DGraph and Neo4j

[abcq]

SQL is a database. Mongo is a JSON kept in a place like localstorage, but such as that you don't control that place. Lol :)

[DeliriumzzZ]

I'm 4 minutes in, but you mention there are no schemas in NoSQL? MongoDB does for sure (and by extension mongoose which we use as our interface). You don't need to use them, however, if you care about the specific contents of your fields, you can make sure that every field is defined by type in a schema. If you want to go more flexible, you can leave off the specific type definition.

Edit; at 5 minutes you mention that NoSQL will let you add documents with incorrect data types. I'm confused here as our database will not allow this, but maybe I'm missing something.