Why I'm Building NodeDB

For the last few years, PostgreSQL has been my default database. Before that, I worked with MySQL, MariaDB, and MongoDB. But once I spent enough time with PostgreSQL, it became very hard to justify anything else for most projects. It gave me the relational model I wanted, plus JSON support that was good enough to remove a lot of my reasons for using MongoDB. When I needed spatial support, I could add PostGIS. When I needed time series and partitioning, I could use TimescaleDB. For a long time, that worked very well. Then the workload started changing. Over the last two years, AI and ML stopped being side concerns and started becoming part of real application requirements. That meant vector search became relevant. PostgreSQL still looked like the right answer because pgvector existed and, at first, it was good enough. But once I started using it across more serious workloads, I kept running into the same friction: scaling and performance concerns, filtering limitations, and dimension an