There are a bunch of common workloads (including i’m guessing HN itself) where the trade offs for distributed databases make them a lot harder to use well, or where distributed databases don’t make sense.
Government agencies I've worked usually build an app and put it in production without very few evolutions for 15+ years.
Data is the most important stuff for them and being able to read it is therefore very important.
A nosql DB structure can usually only be read by the code that goes with it and if nobody understands the code you're doomed.
In 2017, I had to extract data from an app from 1994.
The app was built with a language that wasn't widely used at the time and had disappeared today.
It disappeared before all the software companies put their doc on the internet.
You can't run it on anything older than windows2k.
There was only one guy in Montréal that knew how to code and run that thing.
As the DB engine was relational with a tool like sqlplus, I was able to extract all the data and we rebuilt the app based on the structure we found in the database.
If you want to do that with Nosql, you must maintain a separate documentation that explains your structure... And we all now how dev like documentation.
