Nextcloud asked in a poll at https://mastodon.social/@nextcloud@mastodon.xyz/115095096413238457 what database its users are running. Interestingly one fifth replied they don’t know. Should people know better where their data is stored, or is it a good thing everything is running so smoothly people don’t need to know what their software stack is built upon?
I write software for a living, and have worked with all 3 database options in the past. I don’t know what DB backend my nextcloud server is using, nor do I care.
Yeah, that is the kind of concern for the service developer or a very opinionated sys admin. For self-hosting, few people will reach the workload where such a decision has any material or measurable impact.
Exactly. Unless you are actively doing maintenance, there is no need to remember what DB you are using. It took me 3 minutes just to remember my nextcloud setup since it’s fully automated.
It’s the whole point of using tiered services. You look at stuff at the layer you are on. Do you also worry about your wifi link-level retransmissions when you are running curl?
Sorry for the newbie question, but how is your nextcloud setup automated? Is that like a compose/yaml file?
Self hosting doesn’t mean “being wasteful and letting containers duplicate services”. I want to know which DB application X is using, so I pool it for applications Y and Z.
This is one of my pet peeves with containerized services, like why would I want to run three or four instances of mariadb? I get it, from the perspective of the packagers, who want a ‘just works’ solution to distribute, but if I’m trying to run simple services on a 4 GB RPi or a 2 GB VPS, then replicating dbs makes a difference. It took a while, but I did, eventually, get those dockers configured to use a single db backend, but I feel like that completely negated the ‘easy to set up and maintain’ rationale for containers.
Precisely what pre-devops sysadmins were saying when containers were becoming trendy. You are just pushing the complexity elsewhere, and creating novel classes of problems for yourself (keeping your BoM in control and minimal is one of many others that got thrown away)
For most applications the overhead of running a second DB server is negligible.
And if it’s SQLite (which I believe is the default) it’s really just reading and writing a file on the file system.