Databases in 2025: A Year in Review
67 points by fanf
67 points by fanf
Sorry for slightly meta/off-topic comment but I'd love love love to have this post but for programming language theory and implementation.
The ContextFree channel on YouTube could be worth checking out. While there’s no post for 2025 yet, one might be coming soon. In the meantime, you can watch the “Programming Languages in 2024!” video to see if it appeals to you.
Didn't know MongoDB was suing FerretDB... Interesting to see how that will play out.
MongoDB has been the NoSQL stalwart for two decades now
News to me! Everyone I know either wouldn't touch Mongo with a ten foot pole, or is desperately trying to get off Mongo.
Heh, I haven’t been in this world since around 2019 but observations from that timeframe:
MongoDB was the only NoSQL database that I had ever encountered in production with any of my clients, other than highly platform-specific ones (eg the one that was the recommended path for Google App Engine back in the late 00s)
Many of those clients were indeed trying to migrate off of it, mostly to PostgreSQL or less frequently to a managed MySQL offering.
It did gain a lot of traction I think, but also soured a lot of people from the whole idea of NoSQL over time. One of the most repeated things I heard was “no schema was great until the service had been running and evolved for a while, at which point having database-enforced schema consistency would have been really nice to have”
Database branching is the trend that's most relevant to me at the moment. Query / schema / config recommendation systems have existed for a while now, but they can't empirically tell you what the speedup will be.
I'm not sure how database branching as a service can work though, since sensitive data is a non-starter for many people. So I'm definitely interested to see what plays out here.
The glazing of Larry Ellison at the end is insufferable. "Who cares" what he does in his life outside of his company, really? He's having significant negative impacts on culture worldwide with his muting of speech via acquisitions and throwing around his wealth to silence critics.
It’s Pavlo’s way of taking the piss. Being sarcastic about “Lawnmower” Ellison is one of his bits, like the references to musicians.
It felt sarcastic because of his references to talking to him personally, but I don't know Pavlo's works and if he actually is friends with the billionaire. It was too hard to tell without former context, but my genuine read by the end made me feel like it might be an honest defense of Ellison's character. I do know that institutions rely on donations from such wealthy individuals—I don't know if he donates to CMU.
From what I've seen, the Ellison gag in his yearly posts often catches people off guard, but it's really just Pavlo's spin on the running gag trope. Not sure how far back it goes, but he's been doing it for a while now.
There’s a lot of people weirdly attached to billionaires out there so I get why you’re on guard, but in this case I’m convinced it is sarcastic
Interesting. I couldn’t tell at all. I read the article first, and I thought it was a wall of honest praise.
I read that as a scathing takedown written by someone who has no respect for Larry Ellison at all.
I would bet both my kidneys that Andy's messing around here, and has no sincere love for Ellison. I think it was more apparent in previous years when he's made fun of his marriages.
(agree it'd be really off-putting if it was sincere)
Sugu joining Supabase is like Ol' Dirty Bastard (RIP) getting out on parole after two years and then announcing a new record deal on the first day of his release.
Very cool, seems like an exciting time to be working at/on/with Supabase this year (I'm mostly involved in the packaging side of things so I may end up working on Multigres packaging at some point too)
Mild off-topic critique - the Coldplay incident didn't "break up a marriage" because they had already split before the concert.