Interestingly, one of my 'no' signals is people relying on a DB to do the work for them. Don't know how to index this? Shove it in the DB and query it back.

If you don't have a relational query in mind a relational DB is a bad fit, or at least premature optimization.

I am not quite sure what you mean with your comment, as "relying on a DB to do the work for them" sound like a good thing to me. Its usually way faster than doing stuff in the application code, and the declarative nature of SQL usually means less bugs.

> I am not quite sure what you mean with your comment, as "relying on a DB to do the work for them"

Maybe "to do the thinking for them" would be more accurate.

> sound like a good thing to me.

You did what they do - you assumed based on some your usual workloads that a DB and the overhead of using another language, and a non-compile-time checked language, with poor integration (type mismatch), is the solution for the problem I'm working on.

What I expect them to do is ask questions. How many values are there? Are they complex types or something that would map to tables well? What are the querying requirements? Are there any relational elements to the data?

> Its usually way faster than doing stuff in the application code

If shoving things across two sets of pipes, to a general-purpose app not tuned to your workload, is faster - you're writing your main app incorrectly.

> the declarative nature of SQL usually means less bugs.

A declarative language usually means less bugs. But adding a second mismatched language usually means more. Especially when it comes with a whole new system that takes experts to properly tweak.