Submitted 10 months ago by 
otto@programming.dev to selfhosted@lemmy.world
https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/77738dcc-fb16-471e-918c-b4162d99d54e.png
Nextcloud asked in a poll at mastodon.social/…/115095096413238457 what database its users are running. Interestingly one fifth replied they don’t know. Should people know better where their data is stored, or is it a good thing everything is running so smoothly people don’t need to know what their software stack is built upon?
*18% of the people who answered a poll on Mastodon
It’s funny that the headline frames it as “a big number” when in reality majority of users don’t know what database they’re using and probably don’t even know what a database is. Such polls aren’t useless but you always get skewed results towards the more technical population. They would have to create a poll inside the nextcloud webapp to get more balanced results.
I write software for a living, and have worked with all 3 database options in the past. I don’t know what DB backend my nextcloud server is using, nor do I care.
Yeah, that is the kind of concern for the service developer or a very opinionated sys admin. For self-hosting, few people will reach the workload where such a decision has any material or measurable impact.
stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago Exactly. Unless you are actively doing maintenance, there is no need to remember what DB you are using. It took me 3 minutes just to remember my nextcloud setup since it’s fully automated.
It’s the whole point of using tiered services. Do you also worry about your wifi link-level retransmissions when you are running curl?
Self hosting doesn’t mean “being wasteful and letting containers duplicate services”. I want to know which DB application X is using, so I pool it for applications Y and Z.
And 46% have no idea what a database is.
it's a spreadsheet right?
Honestly I think if there is a hope for greater detach from “The Cloud” more broadly, it’s a testament to nextcloud that folks that don’t even know enough to know what DB they are running are able to run a server, and host things well enough to consider themselves.
This statement brought was to you by someone that set up nextcloud and had no clue what DB it was using.
Are people here trying to “I run arch btw” database services.
Yes that’s me. I have no idea where my Nextcloud uses
Mine is managed hosted so I don’t know.
I can think of few things more boring than databases. I just want my files synced and stored.
Since Nextcloud stores your actually data on the disk, it doesn’t actually matter all that much tbh
There could be multiple factors. For example, I have a Nextcloud instance that is fully managed by Hetzner, and I didn't bother to find out what database it uses...
That’s how I’d answer if I set something up years ago and it was stable and never required me to come tinker with it.
They really push you to install the aio container so it’s not surprising to me.
Where’s the MySQL option? Some of my servers are running MySQL instead of MariaDB because it allowed binding to multiple IP addresses (although I think Maria has implemented this now), and some query plan optimizations were implemented in MySQL but not MariaDB.
I did know when I set it up, but I can’t remember right now. I can easily go check though.
Same. I’m glad I don’t have to think about databases usually.
Honestly I’m not sure I’d know Immich used Postgres if it didn’t outright say so
Ooops@feddit.org 10 months ago Isn’t that the whole point of containerised solutions? Having some pre-setup, auto-updating solution with very little requirement to dive into the details like what your database is and which dependencies you need to manage…
You still need to know what database system is being used in order to make backups of the database. You can’t just snapshot or backup the data directory while a database is running, because you might end up with an inconsistent state that won’t restore properly. You need to either stop the DB before doing the backup, or use the relevant DB-specific tools to perform a backup.
Most of my containerized solutions do that for me.
Ooops@feddit.org 10 months ago So one in five doesn’t do proper backups. That’s much better than expected… 😅
Not sure I understand… Can the type of database be customised during nextcloud installation? If not, then more than 37% gave a wrong answer, which is worse than the 18%?
cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 10 months ago Yes, all three are supported configurations. Technically all four, since “I don’t know” is apparently a completely valid and functional configuration too.
cygnus@lemmy.ca 10 months ago I use the prebuilt Hetzner one and have no idea either.
Yeah. I have used that. And I’m sure most with personal instances that just pressed the “Install NextCloud” button have no clue, including me.
Users is the right word here, not admin, not sysadmin, not owner. Docker pull docker up users that’s it
Read the comments. Self hosters are little more than users anyway.
Also just users. No docker or anything, just using the system someone else setup for them.
NextCloud is used everywhere, also in commercial use.
I can’t believe they asked end users, the question is sent over the fediverse, not X or Bsky…
Or else they would have received tons of « it’s missing my Nextcloud runs on Samsung S24 » comments
I don’t even know myself because I installed it via YunoHost
Same here with Freedombox.
A Freedombox user in the wild!! I’ve been following the project since 2011 but I never thought it really achieved its potential. How do you use yours, and how do you find it?
If you’re running it in a prebuilt container, as long as it works it shouldn’t matter.
Of course, when your database gets corrupted after Nextcloud updates because you had an app running that isn’t supported in the new version, it will suddenly matter a lot.
And if you don’t know what database you’re running, how are you backing it up?
If you don’t know what database you’re running, are you bothering to do a full shutdown before backups? Are you doing backups at all
If you’re using the AIO image, backup/restore can handled for you, so no need to worry about the manual steps involved. Or if you’re using a VM, a backup can take the form of full system snapshots, so also no need to understand how data are stored. Granted it’s always helpful to know what your running, but not necessarily requisite, even for backups.
The poll did not ask specifically for self-hosted instances. You know you can buy hosted Nextclouds where the service provider hopefully cares for that stuff? So customers wouldn’t know which database they use. I don’t know which database my mail provider uses ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Exactly. It’s not important … until it is. :D
I‘m using a hosted Nextcloud instance from Hetzner and I have no idea what this is running on either. There’s a significant number of people who didn’t set up their Nextcloud instance, so people not knowing what it’s running on isn’t too surprising.
troed@fedia.io 10 months ago Will Nextcloud run apps not marked as compatible with that version?
Bugs still happen. Just did with the most recent version and the polls app and mysql
You can specify the behavior in a few places, gui, occ command, config.php. By default no, but if you have an app you want to force in regardless of the version compatibility you can make it so
https://help.nextcloud.com/t/help-what-is-app-install-overwrite-for/71523
SomethingBurger@jlai.lu 10 months ago No.
Honestly, does it matter to a regular user?
There will be some that do matter, if I were to run NC I would use Lite because why throw the data to another process just to write it to a disk when I only have a single node.
Well it does depend on your exact use case, but using a proper database is usually the better option for production. Now if this is just some little service you made for yourself use whatever you want.
SQLite is a proper database. Realistically you’ll never exhaust its 278tb storage limits, it’s thoroughly battle tested, and it’s dead easy to backup.
I doubt nextcloud is running enough parallel db writes for this to actually matter — and if it is WAL mode is still probably good enough.
Once you have multiple software clients running then you will need a client server dbms like Postgres. For most home or group installations, this should not be an issue.
If some of them are users rather than admins, it makes sense and maybe it’s a good sign that they don’t have to know in order to use the service.
Every person using a computer should know what their filesystem is and what database they are using. Otherwise they are fools.
Can you believe kids don’t know what NTFs or APFS are these days?!
Sir, this is a Wendy’s :)
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago Holy Poe’s Law…
Kids don’t event know the folder struture of their Home directory, so why would they know what a File System is? Lol
Wait is APFS a new file system than NTFS? Guess I’m too busy on my Tiktoks and Nintendos to keep up to date
Armor piercing fin stabilized.
It’s used on popular toys and consumer gadgets. Most well to do tech nerds don’t bother with such riff raff either.
Mordikan@kbin.earth 10 months ago Damn kids with your twitternets and me mes.
That kid is never going to figure out if they downloaded the assignment pdf to “Downloads (iPad)” or “Downloads (iCloud)”
Haha at some point it did matter to regular folks though. I remember in Junior high when I would try to pirate games or software on Windows, I learned the big difference between fat32 and the new filesystem Microsoft released, NTFS because I couldn’t download files larger than 4GB on fat32.
I remember having to open “.zip.1” files lol. From the split zips.
I still have a FAT32 external drive that this (very) rarely still bites me 😫 there’s nothing important on it, so I’ve been lazy
At that point, were you regular folks though?
It’s important if you’re using flash drives although even that’s pretty rare these days. My wife has run into this problem by formatting as NTFS (GUID partition table) when print shops’ terrible machines only support FAT32 and/or MBR partition tables.
Thankfully our Macs understand NTFS otherwise those formatted drives from her Windows work computer wouldn’t even work at home.
Railcar8095@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Honestly I’m more concerned about those willingly using sqlite.
Unless it has changed a lot over the years, I remember it being orders of magnitude better with MariaDB than sqlite.
4am@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
SQLite has made huge performance improvements in the last like 3-5 years.
I wouldn’t spin up an enterprise NextCloud with it but for a home NAS serving up to maybe a dozen people it’s more than enough.
Railcar8095@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Maybe it’s that. I haven’t truly used it in 7-8 years… Both next cloud and airflow were horrible with sqlite back then, even for single user small instances.
Will have to try again
SQLite is fine for small amounts of data and very few users. The bottleneck with Nextcloud is almost never the database.