"Do not cite the deep magic to me witch, I was there when it was written"

If you want to do this for fun or for learning? Absolutely! I did my CS Masters thesis on SQL JOINS and tried building my own new JOIN indexing system (tl;dr: mine wasn't better). Learning is fun! Just don't recommend people build production systems like this.

Is this article trolling? It feels like trolling. I struggle to take an article seriously that conflates databases with database management systems.

A JSON file is a database. A CSV is a database. XML (shudder) is a database. PostgreSQL data files, I guess, are a database (and indexes and transaction logs).

They never actually posit a scenario in which rolling your own DBMS makes sense (the only pro is "hand rolled binary search is faster than SQLite"), and their "When you might need" a DBMS misses all the scenarios, the addition of which would cause the conclusion to round to "just start with SQLite".

It should basically be "if you have an entirely read-only system on a single server/container/whatever" then use JSON files. I won't even argue with that.

Nobody - and I mean nobody - is running a production system processing hundreds of thousands of requests per second off of a single JSON file. I mean, if req/sec is the only consideration, at that point just cache everything to flat HTML files! Node and Typescript and code at all is unnecessary complexity.

PostgreSQL (MySQL, et al) is a DBMS (DataBase Management System). It might sound pedantic but the "MS" part is the thing you're building in code:

concurrency, access controls, backups, transactions: recovery, rollback, committing, etc., ability to do aggregations, joins, indexing, arbitrary queries, etc. etc.

These are not just "nice to have" in the vast, vast majority of projects.

"The cases where you'll outgrow flat files:"

Please add "you just want to get shit done and never have to build your own database management system". Which should be just about everybody.

If your app is meaningfully successful - and I mean more than just like a vibe-coded prototype - it will break. It will break in both spectacular ways that wake you up at 2AM and it will break in subtle ways that you won't know about until you realize something terrible has happened and you lost your data.

Didn't we just have this discussion like yesterday (https://ultrathink.art/blog/sqlite-in-production-lessons)?

It feels like we're throwing away 50 years of collective knowledge, skills, and experience because it "is faster" (and in the same breath note that nobody is gonna hit these req/sec.)

I know, it's really, really hard to type `yarn add sqlite3` and then `SELECT * FROM foo WHERE bar='baz'`. You're right, it's so much easier writing your own binary search and indexing logic and reordering files and query language.

Not to mention now you need a AGENTS.md that says "We use our own home-grown database nonsense if you want to query the JSON file in a different way just generate more code." - NOT using standard components that LLMs know backwards-and-forwards? Gonna have a bad time. Enjoy burning your token budget on useless, counter-productive code.

This is madness.

Do you even need a database?