
Ask HN: What are some novel and niche database paradigms? - dfischer
Outside of nosql, relational, graph, and timeseries are there any database paradigms that are defined? I’d like to explore the niche cases of database needs that aren’t so straightforward or needed by the many.
======
haney
I'm not sure that it's a completely different paradigm but Datomic
([https://www.datomic.com/](https://www.datomic.com/)) is a pretty unique
database if you're interested in thought provoking design. Here's a cool video
of Rich Hickey (the creator of Datomic and Clojure) talking about the
underlying data structures and design decisions:
[https://www.datomic.com/](https://www.datomic.com/)

~~~
amirouche
missing link to the video :)

~~~
haney
Ooops, here it is.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cym4TZwTCNU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cym4TZwTCNU)

------
fulafel
Database as a term and concept has a lot of historical baggage and whether
something is considered a "database" or not has a large marketing component.

The traditional function of minimizing slow disk accesseses in the absence of
reasonable sized caches is largely gone as an interesting research area today.
You may want to look at ways of storing data in memory and/or distributed
systems generally. For example, asset data storage and retrieval in games,
succinct data structures, systems like etcd.

Another tangential advice: look at some of the recent published research. Eg
ACM SIGMOD proceedings.

The landscape tends to have relatively shortlived fads that leave behind them
a narrow tail of applications that are actual fits for the idea in question.
(Industry examples: "big data analytics" -> Hadoop, "web scale online db" ->
MongoDB, etc).

------
amirouche
Versioned databases especially for tracking provenance and lineage for data
science models might become of thing. See Apple's Entity Store [0] or my take
on it [1]

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16uU_Aaxp9Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16uU_Aaxp9Y)

[1] [https://github.com/awesome-data-
distribution/datae](https://github.com/awesome-data-distribution/datae)

------
elamje
If you want a good high level overview I recommend Designing Data Intensive
Applications by Kleppmann. You will walk away with a good understanding of the
tradoffs of each paradigm.

------
segmondy
NoSQL is big, anything that's not relational is NoSQL. So key/val, document,
column. There's also object oriented database. This probably covers almost
what you're looking for -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL)

------
probinso
Deductive databases are pretty neat

~~~
probinso
also probabilistic query systems like BayesDB

[https://github.com/probcomp/bayeslite](https://github.com/probcomp/bayeslite)

------
z3ugma
You should check out M, a database with a built-in programming language that
was one of the original nosql transactional databases in the 60s.

YottaDB is a modern company proving an M db.

[https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/m/](https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/m/)

------
giberti
Immutable ledgers (blockchain) and GIS (mixed systems) and search indexes
(elastic) all come to mind as more niche databases. Some of these uses can be
modeled in a variety of engines.

