Everything is a database: the definitive alignment chart for storage pedants
Description
The meme shows a 3×3 grid titled "Database Alignment Chart" on a dark blue background. Column headers read: Access Purist (must be queryable with a query language), Access Neutral (must be queryable with a language), and Access Radical (queryable in any way). Row headers read: Function Purist (must contain digital data), Function Neutral (must contain information), and Function Radical (can contain anything). Cells display images and captions: 1) the PostgreSQL elephant logo with “PostgreSQL is a database”, 2) the Microsoft Excel icon with “Excel is a database”, 3) a screenshot of the game Dwarf Fortress with “Dwarf Fortress is a database”; 4) book spines in a library stack with “A library is a database”, 5) a blurred head-shot of a developer labeled “A senior engineer is a database”, 6) a wooden file cabinet with “A file cabinet is a database”; 7) the board game Battleship with “Battleship is a database”, 8) a Subway sandwich shop checkout counter with “Subway checkout counter is a database”, 9) a white fridge with “A fridge is a database”. The joke satirizes pedantic debates about what qualifies as a database by stretching both functional and access definitions to absurd extremes, a familiar trope for backend engineers and data architects
Comments
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Architecture review outcome: Postgres for ACID, Excel for “self-service BI,” and the office fridge as our cold-storage tier - because if everything’s a database, governance is basically a thermostat setting
The senior engineer as a database is actually the most ACID-compliant option here - isolation is perfect because nobody talks to them, consistency is guaranteed since they haven't updated their opinions since 2003, and durability is questionable after the third reorg
This alignment chart perfectly captures the eternal database architecture debate: PostgreSQL purists insist on ACID compliance and SQL, while the 'Access Radical' camp argues that if you can retrieve state from it, it's technically a database - whether that's querying a senior engineer's brain for tribal knowledge about that legacy system, or checking if there's milk in the fridge. The real joke? We've all worked on systems where Excel genuinely was the production database, and that one senior engineer really did hold all the critical business logic in their head. At least the fridge has better uptime than most microservices
Every org’s database alignment chart: ACID (Postgres), BASE (Excel), and ASK - the tribal-knowledge datastore queried via Slack with a bus factor of 1
SeniorEngineerDB: proprietary English interface, zero replication, schema stored in memory, and RPO equals PTO
Sysadmins: the original schemaless stores with perfect denormalization and zero-downtime queries via coffee-fueled joins