> Odds are, your project won't scale past a scale of 10,000 to 100,000.

That may be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I agree in general that most apps don't need fancy scaling features, but apps that can't scale... won't... and hence "don't need scaling features".

> You won't ever run into the problems of scale in this app, and single-file databases have unique advantages when your scale is small.

I saw a customer start off with essentially a single small warehouse selling I dunno... widgets or something... and then the corporation grew and grew to a multi-national shipping and logistic corporation. They were saddled with an obscure proprietary database that worked like SQLite and had incredibly difficult to overcome technical challenges. They couldn't just migrate off, because that would have needed a massive many-year long total rewrite of their app.

For one performance issue we were seriously trying to convince them to use phase-change cooling on frequency-optimized server CPUs like a gamer overclocking their rig because that was the only way to eke out just enough performance to ensure their overnight backups didn't run into the morning busy time.

That's just not an issue with SQL Server or any similar standard client-server database engine.

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jkrejcha 18 hours ago | parent [-]

I think part of that thinking though is that if you do basic stuff like use a standard database engine or don't go too off the beaten path if that's what you need, it tends to be that you get the ultimately needed scale for basically free.

This is a lot of times what I see the "don't build for huge scale" to be. It's not necessarily "be proud of O(n^2) algorithms". Rather it's more "use Postgres instead of some hyperscale sharded database when you only have 10 million users" because the alternative tends to miss the forest (and oftentimes the scale, ironically) for the trees

	▲	jiggawatts 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, but also I've found that using a decently scalable engine is insufficient for a good outcome without the scaled data. The best software I've written always had > 10 GB of existing data to work with from day one. So for example the "customers" table didn't have one sample entry, it had one million real entries. The "products" table had a real history of product recalls, renames, category changes over time, special one-off products for big customers, etc... That's how you find out the reality of the business instead of some idealised textbook scenario. Things like: Oh, actually, 99% of our product SKUs are one-off specials, but 99% of the user interactivity and sales volume is with the generic off-the-shelf 1% of them, so the UI has to cater for this and database table needs a "tag" on these so that they can be filtered. Then, it turns out the filtering 10 million products down to 100K has non-trivial performance issues when paging through the list. Or even worse, 50% of the products are secret because their mere existence or their name is "insider info" that we don't want our own staff to see. Did I say "staff"? I meant subcontractors, partners, and resellers, all with their own access rules and column-level data masking that needs to be consistent across dozens of tables. Okay, let's start going down the rabbithole of column naming conventions and metadata... You can't predict that stuff in a vacuum, no human has the foresight needed to "ask the right questions" to figure this all out through workshops or whatever. The ground-truth reality is the best thing, especially up-front during the early phases of development. A lot of the above is actually easy to implement as a software developer, but hard to change half-way-through a project.