D&D alignment chart ranks databases, from Postgres lawful good to Excel chaotic evil
Description
The image is a 3×3 grid styled like a Dungeons & Dragons moral alignment chart. Across the top row the column headers read, left to right, “lawful good”, “neutral good”, and “chaotic good”. The middle row headers are “lawful neutral”, “true neutral”, and “chaotic neutral”. The bottom row headers are “lawful evil”, “neutral evil”, and “chaotic evil”. Inside each dashed-border cell, a single database or data store is written in lowercase black text: “postgres” sits in lawful good; “cockroachdb” in neutral good; “redis” in chaotic good; “sqlite” in lawful neutral; “datomic” in true neutral; “mongodb” in chaotic neutral; “oracle” in lawful evil; “kafka” in neutral evil; and “excel” in chaotic evil. The meme humorously assigns moral alignments to popular relational, NoSQL, and streaming data technologies, reflecting developers’ collective opinions about stability, predictability, and potential misuse
Comments
33Comment deleted
Greenfield: “We’ll be Lawful Good with Postgres.” Series B later: Kafka joins as Neutral Evil, Mongo pops up in Chaotic Neutral, and the board deck still comes from FINAL_final_v9.xlsx - alignment drift, meet data drift
The real alignment chart would just be nine boxes of Excel with different version numbers, because we all know every "database migration" eventually ends with Sharon from Finance asking if she can just get the data in a spreadsheet
The real genius here is placing Excel in 'chaotic evil' - because we've all inherited that production system where critical business logic lives in a macro-laden spreadsheet with circular references, passed around via email, versioned by filename timestamps, and somehow running the entire finance department. It's not a database, it's a cry for help with conditional formatting
If 'Neutral Evil: Kafka' or 'Chaotic Evil: Excel' is your source of truth, congratulations - you've implemented eventual consistency of accountability
The alignment’s about right: Postgres is law, Redis is speed, Mongo is plausible deniability, Kafka is “not a database” until it is, Oracle arrives when procurement multiclasses into villain, and Excel runs a reply-all consensus protocol
Oracle as lawful evil: impeccably consistent, but its licensing will CAP your budget faster than any partition failure
Where Mariadb or mysql Comment deleted
was just about to write that. too vanilla maybe? Comment deleted
Doubt, I prefer to use MySQL mostly for its simplicity Comment deleted
yes, vanilla is simple and basic. That's what I meant. Comment deleted
For MySQL it would be second lawful neutral Comment deleted
"boring neutral" Comment deleted
Isn't mysql part of oracle now? Comment deleted
no? there's the Oracle db which is similar, but not the same Comment deleted
MySQL is free and open-source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License, and is also available under a variety of proprietary licenses. MySQL was owned and sponsored by the Swedish company MySQL AB, which was bought by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corporation). In 2010, when Oracle acquired Sun, Widenius forked the open-source MySQL project to create MariaDB. Comment deleted
While Excel is meme, Kafka is not a DB at all🙄 Comment deleted
Kafka stores data, so it is Comment deleted
Csv as db Comment deleted
where does "assorted JSONs on a disk" fall on the alignment Comment deleted
you mean, like mongo? Comment deleted
* on magnetic tape PS. Or, better yet, on a Turing machine's infinte tape. 🤪 Comment deleted
What about Hive ? Comment deleted
Never heard of cockroachedb and datomic until this meme Comment deleted
there Comment deleted
chaotic evil: xml Comment deleted
So you mean Kafka is a DB? Comment deleted
no, he's an author ;P Comment deleted
Now I'm in a parallel Universe totally Comment deleted
Yes, it is Comment deleted
Sql server Comment deleted
Where are DB2, Clickhouse and other olap dbs? Comment deleted
Neutral evil is db.txt Comment deleted
Just look at Kafka Streams with their KTables and KSQL Comment deleted