Ask HN: Do you self-host your database?
Yes. I even go so far as to <i>embed</i> the database in my applications.<p>In general, this is implemented as two main flows:<p>- Data collected from &quot;the edge&quot;: Web servers that serve ads, or receive form fill-outs for lead generation, that do nothing but <i>record</i> this information in a logfile<p>- Configuration and Reporting pushed from &quot;the hub&quot;: A central processing node (usually in a hot&#x2F;warm configuration, but I&#x27;ve been known to use things like raft here) that receives information from flow 1, <i>makes a decision</i> and writes the result to flow 2.<p>Because the &quot;data&quot; I want to materialise to clients <i>always</i> either fits into ram, or is in a coherent stream ready to deliver to a client exactly, my applications are very fast: I can always just add another node (in the right geographic place), however I also noticed another really interesting benefit: It is much easier to develop for than using an external database.<p>I have a general purpose tool I wrote decades ago that moves logfiles around reliably (and at low latency), merges them together, implements failover, etc, so I really don&#x27;t have very much to write to make a new application. Sometimes I experiment with the encoding of the payload, but sometimes not.