[andreimatei1]

> I agree that right now it doesn't make sense.

This CRDB engineer respectfully disagrees. This thread takes it as a given that a non-distributed DB is better if you don't need to scale up (i.e. if you run a single "node"). Let me offer a couterpoint: it's easier to embed CRDB into some software you're distributing than it is to embed Postgres. This is to say, we do try to compete at every scale (well, perhaps not at SQLite scale). CRDB doesn't have all the SQL features of PG, but it does have its pluses: CRDB does online schema changes, it is generally simpler to run, comes with a UI, comes with more observability, can backup to the cloud, can be more easily embedded into tests.

Online schema changes are a big deal; the other thing that I hope will help us win small-scale hearts and minds is the ever-improving observability story. I hope CRDB will develop world-class capabilities here. Other open-source databases traditionally have not had many capabilities out of the box.

[csharptwdec19]

For RDBMS, Firebird SQL has managed to survive well in this sphere, for all of it's warts.

You can run it either as an embedded DLL or as a standalone server, and changing between the two is often just a connection string change; It seems to be fairly popular in the POS space for this reason.