[gpm]

Unless you're operating a "database service", a well defined term (in the license) that excludes almost every use-case

    A “Database Service” is a commercial offering that
    allows third parties (other than your employees and
    contractors) to access the functionality of the
    Licensed Work by creating tables whose schemas are
    controlled by such third parties.

I don't see how SurrealDB could shut you down?

[auggierose]

So if you create schemas on the fly, you cannot? Why would I use such a db?

[sroussey]

Right, so could I use it to creat an Airtable clone?

[fiddlerwoaroof]

Generating a table schema per airtable spreadsheet sounds like an anti-pattern to me.

[jitl]

To me it seems like the options for user-defined schema are either push-down the schema (and do one schema per spreadsheet) which lets you take full advantage of your DB's query planner statistics system etc, do an entity-attribute-value table and deal with building your own query planner and collecting your own statistics, or go with a document store and build some kinds of dynamic indexes instead of dynamic table schemas.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

That being said, I generally agree: I’ve been bitten by enough database products that are some startup’s main product to really trust them. I’d rather use a database that’s either maintained by something like the Apache Foundation (Druid, Pinot, etc.) or one that’s a side project of some big company (FoundationDB) or one that’s been around long enough to be unlikely to surprise us when the team is acquihired.

[threeseed]

I've never seen database that either (a) allows you to create that many schemas at all or (b) doesn't become less stable because of it.

One example of this is that the database may create a directory structure per schema which will then result in file system performance degradation or hitting end user limits.