zlacker

It can absolutely scale well if you design the database properly. However, it’ll probably be fairly high latency compared to a Redis or Kafka stream.

The things that often make databases appear slow is that they’re typically configured for large random reads rather than small uniform writes. And they have insane initial response times because of all the IPC they typically do when starting a session.

But aside from that, if you use a heap table without an index you’ll can probably get similar throughout to Kafka. And if you turn Fsync off you might even get up to REDIS speeds.

>>sontho+(OP)
It's possible at scale, but the engineers that can do that are usually 1:20 outnumbered within most organisations. (when scoping out FAANG and co) Asking a developer to design a database is not even normal process today, unless the ORM does it for you, very little actually is done with the database. It might as well be a flat file...

>>onepla+j
That’s sad. I learned relational DB design before I even really got into systems programming and it was really a valuable thing to learn. You can be so much more efficient and less error prone with normalized data structures.

There’s a reason SQL is still around after all these years. It’s basically math and while the syntax is a little moldy the principles are eternal.