My default position nowadays is “Postgres” and engineering should have to justify why it is insufficient if engineering wants to use something else. It’s worked pretty well
This should be default decision-making process. If your proposition is to move the compromise scale please not only provide the benefits, but also the drawbacks and analysis on transition. This forces proposal to analyze existing status quo and reasons behind it, which is often enough for the proposal to be withdrawn.
Distant relative of 5 whys. We need NoSql document store -> so we can store json blobs -> so we can do databasing at app level -> because DBAs with their insistence on schemas are slow. Oh, so we can solve the problems by hiring one DBA and maybe training two devs instead of hiring full dev team and refactoring stuff for a year?
As someone working with datastore/firestore in a product first created around 10 years ago I wish you could have been there at the time. Running a migration to add a boolean field to all existing documents of a certain type took ~40 hours.
Funny thing is we are now migrating stuff out of datastore (and new stuff is not in datastore to begin with) into an RDBMS, but we are doing it microservice style with each microservice having its own separate database. So relationships are now cross-services concerns...
Not that having EVERYTHING in a single DB is the best approach always, but IMO we should default to keep everything in one single DB.
