Nostr Web Client

Geoffrey Adams

6f8b195eaec49adc40fe33b74733468aed4e86af95d7e1cbad3272d0729cfd8b

I'm a neurophysiologist interested in computational approaches to modeling and data analysis. I work at West Virginia University's Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, but all opinions are my own, and probably confused.

Replying to

jonny (good kind)

I'm sort of afraid to ask but amidst all the ai blog spam I can't find good information. what's da deal with yno the different #database lib? I understand the difference between dbs with fundamentally different architectures like mongodb and couchdb, but like what's the deal with postgres vs MySQL vs mariadb and whatnot, and how come ppl seem to love to hate postgres?

Geoffrey Adams 2y ago

nostr:npub14d70xk632yuqshz7hdrnnj79j3yufrphy4u7ryekmpr7vztwvf5q8zdm4s I'm no expert really, but during my PhD after the 10th time rewriting my Matlab analysis code to rearrange my data in a slightly different way for a new analysis question, I made the slightly peculiar choice to spin up a MySQL database (might have been MariaDB actually, this was not too long after it forked off of MySQL) to solve my data management problem once and for all. It was using a sledgehammer to drive a nail, but by golly that nail got driven. In retrospect I could and should have solved my problem much more simply using SQLite, which doesn't require a centralized database server and lets you easily pass around your dataset in one (potentially massive) file, which is better for scientific data sharing. So I don't know about the differences between major RDBMS software, but my experience taught me that relational databases (whether implemented with RDBMS or more ad hoc methods) are amazing and seriously underused in science, and SQLite is a great tool in particular.